CAMPAIGNING 
N THE BALKANS 



AROLD LAKE 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



E^AIGNING 
IN THE BALKANS 

BY 

Lieutenant Harold Lake 

01 ■ -r^M l ^D t£ 





NEW YORK 

Robert M. McBride & Company 
1918 



Copyright 1918 

by 

ROBERT M. McBRIDE » COMPANY 



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o 



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Printed in the United States of America. 



FEB 12 i9i9 



Published September. I9I8 



©CI.A512313 





CONTENTS 










PART I 


CHAPTER PAGE 


I. 


The Bulgar on the Hill i 


II. 


Roads and Their Making 






14 


III. 


The Seres Road 






27 


IV. 


"Peace-Time Soldiering" 






39 


V. 


Marching by Night 


. 


. 


5o 


VI. 


Concerning War 






60 


VII. 


Our Houses and Tin . 






69 


VIII. 


Rations and the Dump . 






79 


IX. 


Heat and Some Animals 






9i 


X. 


Sundays at the War . 






101 


XL 


Playtime in Macedonia . 






no 


XII. 


How We Went to Janes 






. 121 


XIII. 


Concerning Spies 






- 135 


XIV. 


Our Feasting . 






• 145 


XV. 


Mosquitoes and Malaria 






■ 153 


XVI. 


These Are the Heroes . 






. 163 


XVII. 


The Way Out of the Land 






• 173 



PART II 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Prelude 188 

II. The Balkans and the War . . . 201 

III. The Importance of Salonika . . 212 

IV. Peace in the Balkans .... 220 



VI 



PART I 
CHAPTER I 

THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 

THERE is a hill which rises to the north of 
the small and ugly village of Ambarkoj, 
which in its turn is twelve miles north of 
Salonika. It is not a particularly impressive hill, 
but it happens to command a good view of the 
country for many miles around, so I climbed to the 
top of it, uncomfortably enough by reason of the 
tangle of evergreen oak, the harsh edges of the 
rock, and the thickets of brambles. Right on the 
summit I found all that the birds and beasts and 
sun and storm of Macedonia had left of a man who 
must have fallen in one of the half-forgotten wars 
which have troubled the land. There were the 
scattered bones. Rags of clothing were embedded 
in the ground. Close at hand a couple of clips of 
cartridges proved that he had fallen in the midst 
of his fight. There was the merest remnant of 
his cap, and there was a button which showed him 
to have been a Bulgarian. His rifle had been taken 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

away jut the rest had been left as it fell, left to 
remain through the years, to be a symbol and 
token of all that land which one could see standing 
there beside the tangled rubbish which used to be 
a man. 

It is hard to think of a better place than that 
for the beginning of some account of the country 
of which so many tens of thousands of our men 
are gaining an intimate knowledge, and of their 
difficulties and sufferings and achievements. From 
that high place it is possible to see all the different 
kinds of land which go to make up Macedonia, and 
to remember all the problems which mountain, valley, 
and plain present. And those forgotten bones were 
the witness of the history of the country, of all 
that past conduct of its affairs, of all its custom 
and habit — of all those things which are producing 
so direct an effect on our life today. It may not 
appear that there is an connection between a dead 
Bulgarian on a little hill three thousand miles 
away and the war-time price of sugar in England, 
and yet the connection exists, and will be made 
plain later on. 

If you were to stand where I was standing and 
face the north, you would have on your left a great 
plain rolling away to a blue wall of distant moun- 
tains in the west. Immediately before you, but 
still a little to the left, you would see a line of 
trees and a fresh green in the herbage which would 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 



prove the presence of water with occasional 
swamps. Due north and on all the right would be 
the hills, some of them smooth and gentle, some 
of them great gray mountains. Between them you 
would find the little valleys, and the occasional 
habitations of men. 

One valley there is in particular. It lies at the 
foot of the hill which, indeed, closes the southern 
end of it. From the line where the evergreen oak 
ends it sweeps downward very gently and deli- 
cately for about a couple of miles to where a tiny 
village stands at the foot of its eastern slope, and 
then winds out of sight round a westerly bend. 
On either side it is fenced by considerable hills. 
They rise about it, very grim and forbidding. It 
is not an easy valley to enter from any direction, 
and in consequence it has all the appearance of 
prosperity and comfort. The soil is cultivated. 
There are the wide fields of maize, and the great 
patches of tobacco. In one part of it I found a 
whole series of plots given over to funny little 
plants which made me realize for the first time 
that the tomato and the vegetable marrow are 
very closely related to each other. There is abun- 
dant pasture. Two small square towers of whitish 
brick mark the presence of springs, and all the 
appearance of the ground proves that you could 
find water anywhere by sinking a well twenty feet 
deep or less. The houses of the village have a 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

settled, established appearance, very unlike that 
of the flimsy mud-plastered hovels of Ambarkoj. 
It looks like a place where the generations have 
followed each other in peace, and that is very 
unusual in Macedonia. The bones of the dead 
Bulgarian are there to explain why such tran- 
quillity is unusual; the sheltering hills give the 
reason for the happiness of this one village. 

All that delightful valley is a picture of what 
Macedonia might be, and the most insistent re- 
minder of what it is not. Even the people are 
different. Wandering down the length of it one 
day I found two women and a man working in 
the fields, with two great black pigs frisking and 
gamboling round them like a couple of terriers. 
I asked some question about water, and they stood 
up and answered to the best of their power, frankly 
and courteously. The day after, in another village 
across the hills and down in the plain three miles 
to the west, I tried to buy some eggs, and met 
with nothing but glum silence, averted eyes and 
closed doors. They were the people of the plain, 
whose homes lay open and defenceless; they were 
a people accustomed to war. 

As the village of the hills stands for what Mace- 
donia might be, so does Karadza Kadi, the village 
of the plain, stand for what it is. It is a village 
which knows and obeys the law of that war^- 
troubled land. The homes of its people are poor, 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 

mean structures with never a hint or trace of 
beauty or security about them. If they were burnt 
down and destroyed it would be no great loss, for 
they could be rebuilt so easily. All around stretch 
the miles of utterly fertile land, but only tiny 
patches are cultivated. The approach to the village 
might easily be made into a good safe road but 
it is left a wretched, half-obliterated track swamped 
with water and mud at every time of rain. 

For this is the law of Macedonia, that you shall 
not build yourself a secure and costly home which 
your enemy may at any time destroy or take for 
himself; you shall not plant great fields or any 
more than is strictly necessary for yourself lest 
your enemy come and reap your rich harvest; you 
shall not make an easy road to your home lest your 
enemy come down it swiftly to your destruction. 
It is better and safer to have so poor a house that 
it is not worth the burning, so small a crop that 
it is not worth the gathering, so painful a road 
that it is not worth the traveling. The dead Bul- 
garian explained all these things. The poor con- 
fusion of his bones was the witness that this coun- 
try has not ceased to be ravaged by war, that it 
has known no accustomed peace, that its people 
have not dared to surround themselves with those 
permanent things which are the mark of happier 
lands. 

There can be, one imagines, few more fertile 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



countries in the world, and few indeed in Europe. 
All sorts of rare, desirable things will grow on its 
soil in splendid profusion. Maize is a most flourish- 
ing crop. Tobacco is grown here which is valued 
all over the world. Such things as the little grapes 
which are turned into currants and raisins thrive 
on the hillsides, and there are the plantations from 
which comes attar of roses. There does not appear 
to be any end to the possibilities of Macedonia. 
Civilized nations spend millions in reclaiming land 
in far countries, in clearing it of swamps, mosqui- 
toes and malaria, in perfecting systems of drainage 
and irrigation, and yet here is this rich land, in 
Europe itself, barren and desolate, given over to 
thistles and scrub, with the poison of fever haunt- 
ing every valley, with miserable tracks instead of 
roads — wasted altogether. 

For Macedonia today is not very far from being 
a wilderness. Before the army came to Salonika 
there was scarcely a road worthy of the name 
between the sea and the Bela Sitza range and the 
Struma. There are the hundreds of square miles 
that might be so busy growing food for man and 
beast, and they grow nothing but thistles. The 
hillsides might be rich with vineyards, and they 
are desolate with evergreen oak. There is water 
everywhere, and it is allowed to serve a little 
space and then to wander aimlessly to the sea. 
There might be herds of great cattle and mighty 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 



flocks of sheep, but all you shall find is a few 
tiny cows, a few attenuated goats, and a few 
scraggy, fleshless sheep. Each wretched village 
worries along as best it may, a self-contained com- 
munity, having little traffic with the outer world. 
And between the villages there sweep the miles 
of the wasted land. Wasted because here is no 
security of tenure, no consecutive rule, no assur- 
ance that he who sows shall also reap. Wasted 
because it is a country where you may find the 
bones of the dead on the tops of little hills. 

And in addition to being wasted, the country is 
poisonous. In every low-lying, swampy area the 
mosquito finds an admirable home prepared; and 
there arises the problem of malaria. Modern 
science understnds how to deal with that problem. 
Macedonia could be cleared of it as other countries 
have been cleared. Drainage and the discipline of 
fire would make the country free— only there has 
been no one sufficiently interested in the country 
to take the matter up. The natives, I suppose, 
are accustomed to fever, or perhaps they develop 
immunity. No one from the outside has been 
attracted to the place. Even the wildest American 
millionaire would shrink from working out de- 
velopment schemes in a country compared with 
which the average South American republic is a 
model of stable and constitutional government. 
People have been fighting in and for and about 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

Macedonia from the dawn of history, and so we 
have it as it is today. 

That such a land should be in such a condition 
is a fact that arouses a very bitter kind of anger. 
Few of us, perhaps, have brought, or will bring, 
pleasant memories away from it, but that is the 
fault, not of the land, but of the circumstances 
which have made it what it is. And in spite of the 
things we endured in it, we shall probably remem- 
ber as the years pass by that it is a country which 
has great beauty, grandeur, and an appealing love- 
liness, as one moves from place to place and learns 
all the variety of it. We shall remember again 
the wooded slopes of Kotos, Ajvasil resting so 
happily on the border of the lake, the dim moun- 
tains that hide Fort Rupel, and the little streams 
that run in secret valleys. We shall remember 
such things as these; perhaps we shall forget the 
unpleasant facts. But those unpleasant facts are 
the things which have to be remembered at this 
time, and in any future considering of the Salonika 
campaign; for they have the power to condition 
and to limit every operation that has been or will 
be planned. They are more potent to hinder than 
all the strength of the enemy. When our rulers 
decided on the expedition they opened war not 
against man alone, but also against Nature — 
Nature neglected, misused, spurned. The genera- 
tions to come may ask why they added such a 

8 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 

task to the burden we were already bearing. It is 
not my business to ask that question, but — the fact 
must be borne in mind, for if it is not remembered 
there may be heavy injustice to those who were 
charged to carry out the adventure. 

An army is a large and complex thing with in- 
numerable needs. If you send it to any distant 
place you must either be prepared to supply those 
needs or else be very certain that they can be 
supplied on the spot. Whether or not the fact 
was realized, one cannot say, but a fact it is that 
scarcely a single need of our army in Macedonia 
can be supplied on the spot. I cannot, indeed, re- 
member a single article that was bought in large 
quantities from the inhabitants except forage. 
That was rounded up and stacked — under guard — 
at convenient places, but there was little or nothing 
besides. 

The land has no food to give us. The great 
spaces which might have grown corn are, as I have 
said, busy with thistles. The cattle are so scarce 
and of such shocking quality that if the army had 
begun to eat them they would have been extinct 
in a week and the troops would have been mutin- 
ously demanding bully beef. All our corn and 
meat came, and still must come, across the perilous 
sea. There were, of course, such trifles as melons, 
eggs and tomatoes and occasional fowls, but all 
that Macedonia can give us to eat is the merest 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

drop in the bucket. Every fresh battalion that is 
sent to Salonika means that more ships must bring 
food behind it, and keep on bringing it so long 
as it remains there. 

And not food alone, but everything else which 
an army can possibly require. Guns and ammuni- 
tion must be brought as a matter of course, but 
there must be also all clothing, every detail of 
equipment, tools for every imaginable purpose, 
materials for putting up wire entanglements — 
there is not enough wood in the country to form 
the uprights — and all sorts of hospital stores. 
Paper, pens and pencils, books, bacon, baths, soap, 
/candles, tobacco, matches — all such things must 
be brought across the sea. Galvanized iron, 
wagons, mules, telephone wire, water buckets and 
bivouac sheets — every imaginable thing. For the 
one thing certain about Macedonia is that you will 
not find in the country anything that you want. 

The relation between the dead Bulgar and the price 
of sugar in England is, perhaps, becoming apparent. 
Because so many ships are busy carrying things 
to the Salonika army there are the fewer to fetch 
and carry for the people at home ; the traffic of the 
seas is diverted, and Britain has to put up with 
the consequences. But if, on the other hand, Mace- 
donia in the past had been free from war, with 
power to fulfill its own enormous possibilities, half 
the stuff required might have been bought 

10 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 

on the spot, and half the transport saved. 

But that, after all, is a side issue. The problems 
of sea transport are the problems of the people 
who sent us there. My concern is only with our 
own problems, those interesting puzzles which 
began as soon as the stuff reached the wharves at 
Salonika, and which do continually perplex and 
worry all sorts of people, high and low, and must 
be the greatest trouble General Sarrail has ever 
known. For we came to a country without roads, 
and undertook to push armies into that country 
along tracks radiating as do the sticks of a fan. 
A country without bridges also, and one in which 
the most innocent trickle of a stream may whirl 
up into a great river in the course of an afternoon. 
A country where a way had to be found across 
swamps, and over great hills— a way where no 
way had been before. 

And a modern army cannot be content with 
mere tracks, trodden down though they may be 
by bare feet and unshod bullocks through the 
years. A modern army has heavy, cumbersome 
things to carry with it — great guns, ammunition 
limbers and the rest. These heavy things drive 
the tires into the ground till at last a swamp is 
reached which cries a halt to all adventuring. 
Moreover, a modern army in a wilderness has to 
be fed. If it will advance, then food must be 
brought up to it, day after day. There must be 

ii 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

rations enough for all the men, forage for all 
the animals, material to repair all the inevitable 
wastage of war. These things must be close up 
to the troops and instantly available. They must 
follow close behind each new advance if the ground 
once taken is to be held. If its transport breaks 
down the army is defeated and must inevitably 
retire, or die most uselessly where it stands — and 
an army which dies uselessly is rather worse than 
no army at all. It comes to this, that if you cannot 
keep your army supplied you must not send it 
forward. 

That was the first problem of the Salonika expe- 
dition, and it is still and will always be the chief 
difficulty in the way. Standing there beside that 
dead Bulgar one could realize it all so clearly. 
Transport was not so great a difficulty when he 
lived and died. Heavy artillery was not of the 
first importance and, to a considerable extent, 
armies could live on the land which they occupied. 
A man could go out with his ammunition and his 
rifle and a loaf of bread and do his work for days 
on end. His campaigning did not call for well- 
made roads and strings of motor lorries. It was a 
simple matter of skirmishing men, of good shoot- 
ing, and desperate unrecorded little conflicts. 

But that old order has changed. The Bulgar 
of today digs himself excellent trenches from which 
he must be shelled with heavy guns. To aid him 

12 



THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 

he has all sorts of German guns, brought up along 
carefully prepared roads to the selected positions. 
For a defence he has the almost impassable country 
before him, so that he can deal at leisure with his 
enemies as they advance to the attack. That, at 
least, was the state of things at the beginning of 
the Salonika adventure. 



*5 



CHAPTER II 

ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 

EASTWARD from Salonika runs the road 
which leads at last to Stavros and all the 
land which controls the mouth of the Struma. Some 
five miles out from the town it passes through the 
village of Kireckoj. 

It is a fine road, one of the best whcih the army- 
has made in all the country. Broad and smooth 
it sweeps onward and upward, threading the val- 
leys which lead at last to the Hortiack plateau. 
But when it comes to Kireckoj it is beaten alto- 
gether, forced to remember that it is in Macedonia 
and most unkindly reminded that it cannot behave 
as a road might in a civilized country. I shall 
never forget the surprise and amusement and 
understanding which came in due succession when 
first I marched up that road and encountered that 
obstructive village. 

We had been coming so freely and easily, with 
room to spare for the passing of all the bustling 
motor lorries which raced to and fro. The surface 
was so good that marching was easy. The gradient 

H 



ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 

had been so excellently contrived that we climbed 
without effort higher and higher into the heart 
of the hills. And then quite suddenly we saw a 
few houses before us. Our road disappeared be- 
tween them, and a private, with the armlet of the 
military police, stepped forward and stopped our 
little column. In a little while we realized that he 
had a companion who was busy at the side of the 
road with a telephone. Presently another body of 
marching men appeared, and when they had passed 
we were told that we might go on. 

We passed between the houses of Kireckoj. Our 
fine, broad road had vanished, strangled in mid- 
career. In its place we had a narrow, winding 
track that worked a zig-zag course upwards and 
onwards. If we met a little native cart we had to 
pass it in single file. How motor lorries ever con- 
trive to get through the place I cannot imagine. 
It must be a far longer and more trying perform- 
ance than the rest of the five-mile run to Salonika, yet 
scores of them accomplish it daily. When at last 
we came out at the other end and recovered our 
road we found another policeman and another tele- 
phone operator stationed at the side of it, and then 
we understood. They were on duty there all the 
time to prevent collisions in the village. They were 
the signalmen of the road whose duty it was to 
see that no one went forward from either end un- 
less it was certain that the way was clear. 

15 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

' I' MM— —————— — — — ■— — — — — — MI 

There could not be a better illustration of the 
contrast between Macedonia as it is and Macedonia 
as the warfare of today requires it to be, or as, 
indeed, modern civilization requires it to be. As 
Eastern villages go, Kireckoj is very good indeed. 
Planted in the security of the hills, its houses are 
well built and substantial. It is quite unusually 
clean, its shops do not wear the general Macedonian 
air of being utterly ashamed of themselves, and 
its people appear to be happy, prosperous and una- 
fraid. But there was that horrid little winding 
street, a silent witness to that hatred of free move- 
ment and development which marks the East, a 
barrier to trade as well as to war, the symbol of a 
people who are content if only they are allowed 
to live in a close-packed little circle remote from 
the striving of the world. 

They may be right, of course. That is a question 
with which I have no present concern. The only 
point of immediate importance is that their sym- 
bolical street is a confounded nuisance to soldiers 
who have a war to worry about. It was well 
enough, no doubt, in the days before artillery 
reigned on the battlefield and hiding carefully be- 
hind the corner of a house the soldier shot his less 
cautious enemy and advanced to the next corner. 
But it is not at all well now, as any gunner can 
testify who has tried to take a battery through 
that serpentine alley. 

16 



ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 

I have written so much about Kireckoj, not 
because it is exceptional, but because it is so thor- 
oughly typical. It is a village of the very best 
type, and yet it turns the march of an army into a 
sort of inglorious obstacle race, and all the villages 
of Macedonia have the same awkward character- 
istic. I do not know one with a road running clear 
through from end to end. Salonika itself has 
streets which twist and turn in every direction. 

This was one of the facts which had to be con- 
sidered when the plans were made for pushing 
the army forward. It is natural when one is 
making a road in a new place to follow any 
existing tracks. Those tracks have usually been 
chosen by the wisdom of the centuries because 
they afford the easiest way of getting from one 
place to another. The folly of men is certainly 
stupendous, but you don't get people toiling along 
a difficult way year after year when an easier and 
safer way is open to them. Therefore it would 
have been natural for the new roads to follow the 
old paths, but the nature of these obstructive vil- 
lages made such a simple course very generally 
impossible. In the particular case of Kireckoj it 
could scarcely be avoided, for the valley in which 
it lies is so narrow and precipitous that there was 
no room to swing round it on one side or the 
other. 

What sort of a task the engineers must have 

^7 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

had who planned the first roads out from Salonika 
one can only imagine by studying the obstacles 
which they avoided or overcame, the expedients 
to which they were compelled, and the occasional 
awkwardness of their results. Out in the country 
beyond they could, of course, work with a freer 
hand. On the waste land between the villages you 
can put a road practically where you like, and the 
villages themselves can usually be avoided. 

But there, where there are no dwellings to be 
respected, no claims for compensation to be con- 
sidered, there are other problems, no less intri- 
cate and baffling. Nothing but personal experience 
could teach the unkindness of those problems, but 
any man who served for any length of time in 
the Salonika army will remember and understand. 
All of us had our turn at road-making at one time 
or another, and it is more than likely that all the 
troops at present in Macedonia or who may be sent 
there in the future will have the same tasks to 
perform, for as I have tried to insist, roads are 
the first essential. Somehow or other they had 
to be made, improvised or improved as the army 
pushed forward, with all its inevitable guns and 
lorries and limbers, trailing along behind. 

There is one stretch of road in Macedonia which 
I shall be remembering with mingled hatred and 
affection all the days of my life. When we came 
to the place and pitched our camp on the hills 

18 



ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 



above, nothing at all had been done. Probably 
some one at General Headquarters bad drawn a 
line on the map from one point to another and 
said, "Make a road here," but that was all. The 
rest was left to us and the engineers who were 
our rulers and instructors for the time being. It 
was our job, and we were to get on with as best 
we could. 

High up on the right the great gray hills were 
piled; on the left ran the river, with the wide 
plain beyond. When the engineers went out to 
mark the track of the road they looked at the 
hills and shook their heads, went down to the 
river bed and shook their heads again. I was new 
to Macedonia in those days and I had never seen 
one of the storms which are so characteristic of 
that violent country. Also I was puzzled by the 
fact that considerable boulders were strewn about 
at the foot of the hills, some of them almost as 
far away as the bed of the river. It was difficult 
to see how they had come to roll down the slope 
and across so much level ground. . . . After a 
time I realized that they had simply been swept 
along by the torrents of water rushing down the 
hills, and the difficulties of the engineers began 
to appear even to me. 

They went to and fro, those trained and com- 
petent men, studying the ground with quick, accus- 
tomed eyes. They studied the ground about the 



19 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

river till they had decided on a line above which 
the water was not likely to rise ; they studied every 
turn and swerve of the slope coming down from 
the hills till they had found where the descending 
water would pour on to their road, and where it 
would be safe from such attacks. Presently they 
were marking out the track, and appointing places 
for bridges and culverts, ordaining cuttings and 
embankments. There was a magic in their curt 
sentences which in the end had the power of mak- 
ing one see the road as it would be — as indeed it 
is today — although one could not in the least under- 
stand how it was to be done, what material was 
to be used, where it was to come from, or how 
it was to be brought to the required position. As 
I have said, I was new to Macedonia, and all these 
things were mysteries. I had not at that time 
begun to learn how much can be done with very 
little in the way of tools or material. 

The next day we were busy opening a quarry. 
The great advantage of working in a wilderness 
is that you can take such liberties with it. If you 
desire to remove a mountain and throw it into a 
valley it is not necessary to get permission from 
the landlord before you begin. The engineers chose 
a place in the hillside and we set to work to clear 
away the scrub and the thin layer of earth which 
covered the face of the stone. Down below a space 
was cleared where the stone could be stacked, and 

20 



ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 

the chubby youth in charge of the operations re- 
marked airily that as soon as it was in good work- 
ing order we should be getting out a hundred tons 
a day. 

If there is anything which the British soldier 
cannot do, I should like to know what it is. Ours 
was not one of the pioneer battalions which is sup- 
posed to understand such jobs as this and draws 
extra pay for doing so. The men were just ordin- 
ary — which means extraordinary — soldiers, and 
they set about their work as though they had been 
quarrying all their lives. There were the rifles 
piled in ordered ranks on the ground below to 
prove that they were the servants of another 
trade, but they wrought with pick and shovel in 
expert fashion, and afterwards with hammer and 
drill, boring for the charges of blasting powder. 
The holes were filled and tamped, with the fuses 
in position, and we all went back to the camp to 
eat, to swallow large quantities of vigorously chlor- 
inated water, and to rest in such shade as we could 
find through those midday hours when the sun 
seems determined to burn up all Macedonia. Only 
the engineer remained behind to light the fuses, 
and the only victim of the explosions was a sorrow- 
ful sheep which seemed to have made a hermitage 
for itself just above the place where we had been 
working. We found some of it when we went back 

21 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

in the late afternoon. There is nothing at all to 
be said for Macedonian mutton. 

Day by day the quarrying went on, and in the 
meantime one of the engineers had dressed him- 
self carefully and gone in to Salonika to talk to 
people in authority. Presently he came back, and 
in his train came various interesting, useful things. 
Wagons began to roll up, carrying little trucks, 
lengths of rail, and more tools. By the time we 
had got a great pile of stone erected at the entrance 
to the quarry, another party was busy clearing a 
track down to the road half a mile away, fixing the 
rails to sleepers, cutting sidings, and generally 
making a most adequate little tramway. In less 
than a week the little trucks were running down 
the line filled with stone which was emptied into 
wagons at a cunningly contrived loading place and 
carted away north and south. The empty trucks 
were hauled back to the quarry by mules, and all 
day long the busy work went on, and the road 
took shape and form along the way which other 
toilers had prepared. 

We learned many interesting things about the 
qualities of the stone of Macedonia in those days, 
when we left the quarrying to others and proceeded 
to become road makers. But first we learnt how 
the surface must be prepared before the stone was 
put on it. With pick and shovel we attended to 
it, first marking out the straight run of the road, 

22 



ROADS AND T HEIR MAKING 

B 

then clearing off all the scrub and grass which 
might be in the way, and next digging down at 
each side and making a careful slope up the center 
so that the camber might be all that could be 
desired. 

Every few yards there were little drains to be 
cut so that the water might not lie under the 
surface of our road, and there was a ditch to be 
dug along each side of it. All the little gullies which 
crossed it had to be provided with drains — long 
wooden tunnels with big stones packed around 
them. For the protection of these drains it was 
necessary to build breakwaters across the gullies 
a couple of yards or so away, piling more big stones 
loosely together, so that when the storm sent a 
descending torrent some of the force of it would 
be broken and it would only be able to trickle 
gently through. Then, when all these preparations 
had been carried out, the road itself could be 
attended to and we wrestled with the piles of stone 
which the wagons had dumped by the side of it 
while the watchful engineers walked to and fro 
and saw that everything was done in the right way. 

First came a layer of large pieces of rock, com- 
fortable lumps as big very often as a man's head, 
till the whole surface was the most distressing 
processional way that any pilgrim of the past could 
have desired. The morning after a good stretch 
of that ferocious paving had been completed, we 

23 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

found, when we went down to draw tools for the 
day's work, that each of us was to be furnished 
with a hammer. Then was made clear the differ- 
ence between experience and inexperience. Those 
who were old at the game looked over the pile of 
hammers carefully, and chose little ones, stubbly 
little chaps with short, stumpy handles. Some 
of us, on the other hand, had enlarged ideas 
about our own strength, and a deal of sincere 
ignorance, and furnished ourselves with imple- 
ments with which Thor might have been con- 
tent. We had yet to learn that breaking stones is 
quite a scientific game, depending not at all on 
great muscles or mighty, smashing blows. 

We went down to our road and scattered our- 
selves along it, each man before a pile of the rock 
that was waiting by the side, and set to work. 
It was very early in the morning when we arrived, 
but as the sun climbed higher, tunics came off and 
sleeves were rolled up and the bronzed faces were 
wet and shining, while the clatter of the hammers 
never ceased. Then did we foolish ones with the 
big hammers realize that to the stone-breaker the 
wrist is more important than the biceps, and while 
the little ones went tapping merrily on the beat 
of our preposterous weapons grew slower and 
slower and our piles of broken stone seemed never 
to increase. Four hours of breaking stone with a 
big hammer is enough to put any man out of con- 

2$ 



ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 



ceit with his own strength and to set him devising 
all sorts of straps and bandages for his tormented 
wrist. 

But with a well-chosen little hammer it is a 
pleasant job, as I found later on. There is such 
satisfaction in the gradual increase of knowledge 
which teaches one at last the right place for the 
blow to fall and the exact amount of force required 
so that the stone shall be shattered into fragments 
of the required size; it is so comforting to attack 
a great piece of rock with repeated little blows 
till all its joints are loosed so that one sharp stroke 
at the right moment sends it tumbling in all direc- 
tions. One can sit there, working away, dreaming 
of all sorts of remote and happy things. I know 
now why so many of those gnarled old men whom 
one used to find breaking stones by the roadside 
in England a quarter of a century ago were so 
placid and happy, looking out beyond the world 
with eyes that smiled. One can imagine many less 
secure refuges for a tortured heart and mind than 
a pile of stones by the wayside and a little hammer, 
with the high sun over all. 

Well, we broke our rocks into little pieces, and 
scattered them over the surface of our road till 
all those big foundation stones were covered three 
inches deep. Above them we scattered earth that 
it might work in with them and bind them to- 
gether, and the wagons began to pass to and fro 

*5 



C AMPA IGNING IN THE BALKANS 

a i g ■■ 'j" ' ' ' — — 

along the way we had made. It may not have been 
road-making- according to the best modern ideas, 
but there at least was a highway, apt and ade- 
quate for the service of either peace or war. 



26 



CHAPTER III 

THE SERES ROAD 

ONE road there is in Macedonia which dom- 
inates all the rest. It is so much more im- 
portant than the others — though many of them 
have great value and are indeed vital to the needs 
of the campaign — that it is frequently referred to 
without any mention of its name. So you may hear 
one man say to another, "Oh yes, that happened 
just by the twenty-fifth kilo." Everyone under- 
stands. To the uninitiated it might sound as if 
there was in all the country only one stone which 
marked twenty-five kilometers from Salonika, but 
every one who has been out for any length of 
time knows perfectly well that the Seres road is 
referred to, that long highway which runs from 
Salonika northeast to the Struma and then, after 
crossing the river, swings southward to Seres. 

That road has played a big part in the campaign, 
and will continue to do so to the end. A glance 
at the map will show the reason. It is the one 
way of approach to a very considerable portion of 
the Struma front. All the men engaged on that 

27 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

front must pass up the road to their work, and 
all their supplies of every kind must follow them 
along the same way. There is not a yard of rail- 
way available in this direction. It is true that men 
and material for the district commanding the 
mouth of the river can be taken round to Stavros 
by sea, but for the furnishing of the chief part of 
the line the Seres road is wholly responsible, and 
some knowledge of it is necessary to any clear 
understanding of the progress and difficulties of 
the whole adventure. Ignorance of the nature of 
the road has led to a great deal of misunderstand- 
ing in the past, and more has been expected of the 
Salonika armies than they could have accomplished. 
Very many soldiers are introduced to the road 
as soon as they land. There is the day of dis- 
embarkation down there at the edge of the bay, 
and the march through the evil-smelling, badly 
paved town. For two or three days they wait at 
the base camp, going for short marches, finding out 
all the customs of the country, and learning not 
to expect the appearance of a portable church 
every time the ringing of numerous unseen bells 
heralds the appearance of a flock of goats. Then, 
if their division is on the Struma, they march out 
one morning northwards past Lembet on the first 
stage of their fifty-mile journey. And if they are 
fresh troops just out from England and have 
arrived in the summer they do not enjoy it at all. 

28 



THE SERES ROAD 



They may get as far as Giivezne, fifteen miles out, 
in comparative comfort, but once they reach that 
spot and encounter the hills, their troubles begin. 
It is all so new, so strange, and so very uncom- 
fortable. There is the rising at painfully early 
hours in the morning so as to get well on the way 
before the heat becomes too fierce for marching. 
Then there is that terrible time in the middle of 
the day when one searches in weary despair for 
some kindly touch of shade, when the heat and 
the flies make sleep impossible, when the only 
thing with which thirst can be relieved is chlorin- 
ated water which seems, in those early days, to 
parch the throat and mouth. And in the evening, 
when it might seem possible to rest in the blessed 
relief of the cool twilight hours, there is the need 
to get up and press forward once again, coming 
in the darkness to camp in a strange place where 
no one can find the water supply, and the cooks 
take hours fumbling through the dark to prepare 
any kind of a meal. It needs an uncommonly stout 
heart to stand the strain of those initiatory days. 
The Seres road in summer can be very unkind even 
to seasoned troops accustomed to the country. For 
newcomers it is the most searching kind of test. 
I have seen them so often, new drafts fresh from 
England, toiling hopelessly up those unending 
steeps, choked and blinded by the dust of the lorries 
and ambulances which are racing to and fro all the 



29 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

time. All that they are feeling is written so plainly 
on their faces. They are so far away from home 
and all the beloved, accustomed things. Enthusi- 
asm and love of adventure might have carried them 
triumphantly through some wild brief rush in 
France, but in this there is no adventure. Here 
is no glory, no swift conflict and immediate service. 
This is nothing but dull, unending toil, with all 
the pains of thirst and weariness in a strange and 
friendless land. Those are the hours when the 
weight of the pack becomes an intolerable burden 
to the young soldier, and the rifle seems a fiendish 
encumbrance devised with infinite skill to torment 
its owner. At that time everything tends to pro- 
voke a fierce, unreasoning anger. The shape of the 
head of the man in front appears to be utterly de- 
testable, the carriage of the man on the left is 
a torment. We all know that hour, we who have 
learned the obedience of war and have had to pass 
through that flaming test to find the indifference 
to bodily discomfort, the disregard of hardship and 
fatigue which are the gifts which his life does at 
last bestow on the soldier. But it is very hard to 
meet that hour and the Seres road at one and the 
same time. 

It is too much for some of them. They get 
permission to fall out, and their position is, if any- 
thing, rather worse than before. They are alone 
now, but still the journey must be completed. In 

30 



THE SERES ROAD 



the days of training in England, to fall out on a 
march often meant a lift from some friendly carter, 
or perhaps a drink at some cottage door or a few 
apples — but here there is nothing. The lorries are 
pounding by, but they are much too busy to stop 
and collect people who are merely tired. There is 
no sign of any water, nor of any habitation of men. 
There is only the long road winding up the eternal 
hills, and all the burdens still remain to be dragged 
after the vanishing column. 

And then, perhaps, the youngster realizes that 
he has been a fool. The others will have reached 
camp and food and drink and rest long before him. 
They will be taking their ease while he is still toil- 
ing on ; when he arrives there will be no sympathy, 
but those who endured to the end will sneer at 
him, and officers will be demanding explanations. 
... I fancy that a great many men will put 
down the most painful hour of their lives to the 
account of the Seres road. Some of us, saved by 
strength or determination or sheer cross-grained 
temper, have managed always to keep our places 
on the march, and so know nothing of the misery 
which must surely come to the man who falls out, 
but I fancy that even we give thanks that it is 
not possible to march up that road for the first time 
twice over. Those who have been there will know 
what I mean. 

But the Seres road is not content with torment- 



3 1 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

ing newcomers and teaching them with exceptional 
severity that sharp lesson which every soldier must 
learn before he is a man made and approved. That 
is only one of its activities. It also contrives to 
be the greatest possible nuisance to people high 
in authority. 

Fifty miles of an English road, running smoothly 
over a fine surface, with none but gentle slopes, ii 
not such a very serious matter. If, for instance, 
the Seres road were such as that great highway 
which runs from London to Aldershot, it would 
be almost as good as a railway — better in many 
respects. Supplies could be whirled up to the 
front without difficulty, and the wounded could 
be brought back without pain. The swift lorries 
could hurry to and fro all day long; there would 
be no discomfort for the marching men. Given 
transport enough, an army of almost any size could 
be provided with all the material of every kind 
which it required, without any peril of delay. But 
this road of ours is worse than anything that there 
is to be found in England. 

It would be hard to make a map on a scale larg© 
enough to do full justice to the difficulties which it 
has to encounter. The hills which lie in its way 
are the most resolute foes of traffic that any one could 
imagine. There is no simple matter of climbing 
up one long slope to the highest point at Lahana 
and then running pleasantly down on the far side. 



THE SERES ROAD 



It has to get across not one hill but an utterly- 
mad tangle of hills. It climbs up and up, and then 
loses all it has gained in a wild dash downwards 
which brings it back almost to the level from 
whence it started, with all the work to be done 
over again. And this happens not once but, in 
seeming, endlessly, and almost the whole of its 
course is the most violent kind of switchback. 

Its hills would be alarming enough if its sur- 
face were good, but the surface of the Seres road 
is atrocious. There is nothing in the least won- 
derful in the fact, nor is any one to be blamed for 
it. Everybody knows how our roads in England 
have to be petted and pampered if they have to 
bear much fast, heavy motor traffic. The most 
perfect surface gives way sooner or later under 
the constant strain and suction of the whirling 
tires, and repairs are going on all the time. The 
Seres road had to start with a surface a good deal 
worse than that of the ordinary macadamized road. 
It was made very much in the fashion which I 
described in the last chapter; indeed no other 
fashion was possible. It certainly existed before 
we came to Macedonia, but in those days most of 
it can have been no better than one of the ordinary 
native tracks of trodden earth. The army has 
labored over all the length of it and continues to 
labor, and will have to continue to do so, 
but what can you do with mere stones and 



33 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

earth to defy the rushing wheels which cut and 
wrench and tear the surface as fast as it is laid 
down? It would take something made of ferro- 
concrete to stand the strain which that road must 
endure, week in and week out, all the time there 
is a gun on the Struma which has need of shells, 
or a man who must be supplied with food. 

The rulers of the Army Service Corps may know 
how many lorries go up and down that road every 
day. I cannot pretend to any such knowledge. I 
only know that it is never free from the grimy, 
lumbering monsters. I have camped beside it for 
days at a time, and they were thundering past all 
the while. Between the convoys there will come 
the lighter ambulances. Sometimes there will be a 
battalion marching up with the long train of its 
transport grinding on through the inches of dust 
or mud ; sometimes it will be a battery of artillery. 
All day long the road knows no rest; lights are 
flashing up and down it through all the night. In- 
evitably its surface is reduced to a condition which 
would drive an English motorist to suicide — and 
it is fifty miles long. 

So all those people who wonder why Seres and 
Demir Hissar and Fort Rupel were not taken last 
summer must be referred to the Seres road for the 
answer. They must ask the drivers of the lorries ; 
they must inquire from the sick and wounded who 
endured that journey down in the ambulances. 

34 



THE SERES ROAD 



More fortunate than many, I was on the other 
side of the country when my time came, and I 
went very comfortably down to the sea in a hospital 
train, but friends of mine were carried down the 
road in the Red Cross cars, and I know what it 
meant to them. The most careful driving and the 
best springs in the world cannot save a broken 
body when the way is full of holes and stubborn 
upstanding rocks. 

But the great point so far as operations on the 
Struma front are concerned is this, that in all 
your making of plans you are inexorably limited 
by the power of the road to bear your transport. 
Even if you had unlimited lorries at command, you 
could only get so many of them on to the road 
in a given time. The wear and tear, too, are 
frightful, and motors cannot last half as long as 
they would on an ordinary road. And of course the 
hills and the surface together cut down speed 
relentlessly, and the journey is a long, painful 
business. 

Bearing these facts in mind, consider how vast 
are the needs of an army which is operating on an 
extensive scale. There will be many batteries, and 
all of them must be kept supplied with shells. A 
battery can blaze away in minutes ammunition 
which it has taken hours to bring up, and once 
your lorries are empty they must go all the way 
back before they can be refilled. In Sir Douglas 



35 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

Haig's report on the Somme offensive he told how 
hundreds of miles of railway had to be laid down 
in preparation for that great move. We have only 
fifty miles of a disastrous road and no railways 
at all. Supplies, supplies and again supplies — that 
is the keynote of success for the modern army. 
As your transport is, so will your victory be. The 
highest skill, the greatest degree of valor, these 
will be useless unless the material you require is 
instantly ready to your hand. Deprive your battery 
of shells, and you had better destroy the guns 
before they fall into the hands of the enemy. 

Shells for your guns and food for your men — 
these things are essential. And there are count- 
less other articles almost as important. You must 
have barbed wire for your defences, and wood and 
galvanized iron and sandbags for your trenches. 
Bombs must be brought up and ammunition for the 
rifles. Tools of all sorts must be ready behind 
the line, and wherever the advance goes the sup- 
plies must follow it if you are to hold the positions 
you have gained. These statements are the merest 
commonplaces of war as it is waged today, 
but to appreciate the full force of them one needs 
to be sitting at the far end of the Seres road waiting 
for things to arrive. 

Very wonderful country that is, up there just 
beyond Lahana, where the whole of the Struma 
plain is spread below and the great hills stretch 

36 



THE SERES ROAD 



away to left and right, some clothed with trees, 
some bare and gray with the naked rock. If one 
could just sit and look at it, the prospect might 
appear to be altogether admirable, and one could 
find something of pleasure in the far prospect of 
Demir Hissar and the great mountains which rise 
beyond. But one has other business on hand. 
Down in that plain the Bulgar and the Hun are 
waiting, and we have to deal with them — and there 
are the miles of that atrocious, dominating road. 
Some day perhaps the full story of the road will 
be told. I think it would take a driver of the 
A.S.C. and one of the R.A.M.C. to do it properly, 
with, perhaps, a chapter from one of those un- 
happy infantrymen I was writing about just now. 
Words alone would hardly be able to do it justice, 
so perhaps the cinematograph might be brought 
in to assist, and in time the people of Britain 
might understand something of what is involved 
in this campaign, how much there has been to do 
and to endure, how great have been the difficulties, 
how stern are the limitations. Whether or not 
the peculiar features of the road were fully realized 
when the adventure was planned is a question on 
which the future may possibly throw some light. 
But it is at least necessary and only fair that they 
should be generally understood now. The nation 
should know what manner of task that is which 
its soldiers are performing, lest there be a ten- 



37 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

dency to judge without knowledge and to condemn 
without the evidence for the defence. Last sum- 
mer the English newspapers were announcing the 
beginning of a great offensive on the Struma. It 
would have required several miracles and a few 
thousand magic carpets to have turned that offen- 
sive into anything like the mighty affair which it 
was to have been in the minds of the innocent and 
imaginative sub-editors who designed those trump- 
eting headlines. 



3* 



CHAPTER IV 



ACTIVE service from the soldier's point of 
view, is such a queer mixture of the real thing 
and of that other business which is contemptu- 
ously referred to as "peace-time soldiering." Our 
new armies are not fond of peace-time soldiering. 
The men put on khaki suits for the purpose of 
killing Germans, and they find it hard to under- 
stand why they should not be allowed to get on 
with that interesting business. Besides, it seems 
so very absurd to come across the sea to a place 
where war is actually going on and then to settle 
down to life in a camp where things are very much 
the same as they would be in England, except that 
minor luxuries are hard to come by and week-end 
leave is a thing of the past. 

There is probably less of this irritating life in 
Macedonia than anywhere in the areas of the war, 
just because the roads need so much attention. In 
the early days everybody who was not digging 
trenches was busy on the roads. There was so 
much to be done, and labor was so scarce that the 

39 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

army was set to navvying as a matter of course. 
But as the more urgent tasks were accomplished 
the hated, necessary thing came back and in the 
camps all over the country men found themselves 
doing once more the things which they had hoped 
they might be allowed to forget. For an army has 
many of the qualities of steel, and if it is to be of 
the greatest possible value when the time for using 
it arrives it must be kept keen and bright by 
constant polishing. If it is allowed to relax and 
grow slack, there is a peril that it will fail when 
the time of testing comes — and something more 
than drill is learnt on the parade ground. 

One area there is in Macedonia where peace- 
time soldiering is specially possible and where it 
is carried out with a deal of energy. The troops 
which may happen to be stationed for a time on 
the Hortiack plateau have little to do in the way 
of road-making, and their commanders take good 
care that they shall have every chance of reviving 
the memory of the lessons learnt during the train- 
ing in England. Indeed it is a kind of polishing 
station where divisions can be sent in turn to be 
smartened up and reminded that even if they are 
on active service, the man who comes on parade 
unshaven is a very dreadful criminal. 

It is a good place for the beginning of one's 
experience of Macedonia. High above and to the 
east of Salonika Bay, the plateau rolls along for 

40 



"PEACETIME SOLDIERING" 

miles to where Kotos, that excellent mountain, 
climbs into the sky. People who cherish dim 
memories of things learnt from geography books 
at school may be under the impression that a 
plateau ought to be flat, but there is nothing in 
the least flat about Hortiack. It consists of endless 
hills, and though they are not nearly so big as 
those which torment the Seres road, they are big 
enough to provide ample exercise for the men sta- 
tioned among them. On the infinite variety of 
their slopes the camps hide coyly away, and it is 
no small adventure to be sent to that area to find 
any particular battalion. You may find all the 
rest of the brigade to which it belongs and still 
fail to discover the object of your search. There 
are those concealing hills on every hand, and no- 
body seems to know the exact spot you are seek- 
ing. And even when you have been there a week 
or two the troubles are not entirely at an end, and 
it is not safe to be too confident in the power of 
your sense of direction. It is better to keep an 
eye on the sun and to study landmarks and bear- 
ings before you set out to explore those complicated 
valleys. 

Everywhere from end to end of the area one 
found the busy camps in the days when I knew 
the place. Remote though it might be from the 
actual fighting, there was plenty of the sound of 
war in the air. You see in those sudden little 

41 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

valleys there is plenty of space for the more violent 
parts of training to be carried out without danger 
to other people, so a trench-mortar battery would 
be busy in one secluded dell, a grenade school in 
another, and a machine-gun class in a third. They 
would be banging away all day long as instructors 
toiled to perfect the pupils in the art of abolishing 
the King's enemies. And then, rounding a sudden 
bend you would come upon a broad, flat space 
where a battalion was drawn up on parade going 
through battalion drill just as it might have done 
in any park in England. 

We had a camp which was built on nearly as 
many hills as Rome, and to get from the officers' 
lines to the mess involved the descent of one steep 
little hill and the ascent of another, while the duties 
of the orderly officer took him up and down stiff, 
slippery slopes all day long. But it was a fine 
place, and it was very good to live there, and to 
be able to sit in the evening looking out over the 
smooth water of the bay to where Mount Olympus 
stood, a beautiful, ghostly shape, sixty miles away. 
And in the bay there were the ships which had 
left England only a little while ago, and one did 
not seem so far away from home. There were 
other advantages, too. Hortiack — its proper name 
is Hortackoj but we never rose to that pitch of 
accuracy — is only seven miles from Salonika, and 
it was possible to get out supplies for the mess, 



"PEACETIME SOLDIERING" 

so there was never any lack of those little lux- 
uries which do so much to make life bearable in 
distant lands. It was also possible to get into the 
town itself occasionally, though Salonika is not 
exactly the sort of place one would choose for a 
pleasure trip. Still it is a town, with shops and 
restaurants and crowds of people, and after a pro- 
longed course of Macedonia one is grateful for 
very little. 

There were times when we did not altogether 
appreciate our spell of peace-time soldiering. One 
day in particular will remain in the memories of 
some of us as long as we are capable of remem- 
bering anything. Some one in authority had 
evolved a tactical scheme on a large scale, and no 
one realized quite how large that scale was. We 
were quite accustomed to brigade operations which 
began at five in the morning and ended at eight, 
and we thought that customary program was to 
be carried out on this occasion and that we should 
all be back in time for breakfast. 

We were ordered to parade at 4:45 a.m., so we 
were busy getting up soon after four, and even in 
summer time getting up at that hour on those 
hills is rather a chilly business. Somehow we 
groped our way on to parade and marched off. It 
was about two hours later that we realized that some- 
thing very unlike the usual program was contemplated. 

43 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

For we had marched and continued to march alto- 
gether in the wrong direction. There was no sign 
of a swinging round so that our faces might be 
turned towards home, and we began to wonder 
with a certain acute interest what time it would 
be when we got breakfast. So presently we came 
to the edge of the plateau and halted there, looking 
northwards over the quiet level of Lake Langaza 
to the tumult of the hills which lay between us 
and the Struma. We waited there for a long time, 
reflected that it was five hours since we had got 
out of bed, and remembered that in those latitudes 
no parades are supposed to take place in summer 
between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. It seemed reasonable 
to suppose that we should be sent home imme- 
diately, and that we must have completed our mys- 
terious share of the operations. 

But no one seemed inclined to send us home. 
Instead we were thrust out along the edge of a 
precipice and sent skirmishing back from it over 
large areas of Macedonia in its most untamed and 
riotous mood. It was blazing hot by this time, 
and most of us had got out of the habit of seeing 
that our water-bottles were always full. By the 
time we had reached and occupied the crest of a 
low hill looking towards our very distant home 
a number of men were sighing for a cosy corner 
in one of the trenches of France, and the rest were 
inventing suitable destinies for the general who 

44 



"PEACETIME SOLDIERING" 

designed the scheme which we were carrying out. 
I heard a great many suggestions, but none of them 
were really adequate. After a little further baking 
on that ridge we moved forward again and occu- 
pied another hill. This time we were really getting 
nearer home, and things looked more hopeful, but 
the designer of the scheme was a thorough man, 
and he believed in doing things thoroughly. All 
at once we were switched off to take part in a wide 
flanking movement, which included the assault of 
three more hills, and then we were told that we 
might go. That last three miles back to camp 
nearly finished us. We reached the camp a little 
over ten hours after we left it, and there was 
hardly anyone who had had a mouthful to eat or 
drink since he tumbled out of bed. 

I am not putting this forward as the classic in- 
stance of endurance, to be recorded in all military 
manuals hereafter forever as a standard by which 
all future achievement shall be judged. It was, of 
course, a mere nothing from the soldier's point of 
view, and that is just why I have written about 
it. For it seems rather a good illustration of the 
ease with which all sorts of men have adapted 
themselves to the soldier's life in these days of 
the nation's necessity. It is the kind of thing which 
has been done over and over again since the war 
began by tens and hundreds of thousands of people 
who before the war would never have dreamt that 

45 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

it was possible to get up and work hard with their 
bodies for ten hours without food or drink. 

If in the days of peace an employer of five thou- 
sand men had suggested that they should accom- 
plish such a feat and had ordered them to do it, 
there would have been a strike on a large scale, 
and the employer would have been accused of in- 
credible brutality. But there were many more than 
five thousand of us, and no one thought of accusing 
the responsible general of brutality, fervently 
though we cursed him at the time. We were in 
the army now and it was all in the day's work. 
We had learnt that we could do something which 
we had never thought of doing before ; we had 
gained some information about the power of these 
bodies of ours to do and to endure without disaster 
and, indeed, without overwhelming discomfort. 
As soon as we got into camp we proceeded to learn 
something about their power to appreciate good 
food and drink. I have to confess that my share 
of the performance in the mess consisted of an 
ordinary lunch — it came first, because it was ready 
and waiting for us — followed by a very complete 
breakfast. Somehow it seemed a pity to miss a 
meal. 

So our life went in those days at Hortiack. There 
was always plenty to do, and yet it was in its 
way a holiday. Also there were occasional amuse- 
ments, not the least of which was provided by the 

4 6 



"PEACETIME SOLDIERING" 

Greek muleteers. To drive some of the innumer- 
able mules required to cart the army's luggage 
about the hills of Macedonia a number of Greeks 
had been employed. In addition to becoming 
acquainted with the mules, they were supposed to 
learn some drill, and a number of unfortunate 
sergeants had been told off to drill them. Those 
sergeants did not enjoy life very much. The first 
thing to be done was to find some one in the 
squad who knew enough English to translate the 
words of command, but the sergeant who cannot 
work off his characteristic sarcasms on his pupils 
is not likely to be very happy. Besides, the Greeks 
seemed to have an eternal objection to marching in 
step. They would go strolling along, with the ser- 
geant bellowing his "Left, Right, Left," and the 
linguist of the squad making Greek noises to the 
same effect, but those muleteers took no notice. 
They did not even trouble to march in time. They 
sprawled over the ground with happy smiling faces 
and the most complete indifference to the noisy 
people who barked at them, and the Tommies stood 
round criticizing the performances while the ser- 
geants perspired in ineffectual rage. 

But there was a better thing than this: there 
was a band. How it came to be there no one 
seemed to know, but it lived somewhere among 
the little valleys, and it used to be sent round to 
give the various battalions a treat on rare, delight- 

47 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

ful evenings. If you want to appreciate even a 
third-rate brass band, go to Macedonia for a few 
months. And this was quite a good band, and it 
played all sorts of tunes we knew and had been 
accustomed to hear at home in the days before 
there was a war, as well as some others which 
we were assured were the latest favorites and 
would certainly greet us on our return. The whole 
battalion would be aware of the fact that the band 
was going to pay us a visit three days before it 
was to come, and everybody was waiting for it 
when it arrived. 

I remember the last of these excellent concerts 
which we had. It was in the hour before dinner, 
and the musicians had stationed themselves on the 
top of one of our numerous hills. Some one had 
sent over to the mess for some chairs, and there 
had come also a tray bearing bottles — sherry, ver- 
mouth, bitters and gin, those amiable liquids which 
do so excellently prepare the way for a meal. So 
we sat there and listened, and the men were all 
gathered round. Sometimes a familiar chorus 
would be taken up by a hundred voices ; sometimes 
there was only the deep, appreciative silence, while 
the music flowed on. For a little while we were 
home again. We did not regard the sea below or 
the evening sky, or the far shape of Olympus, or 
any of those things which surrounded us. We were 
back among familiar scenes, and faces we knew 

4 8 



"PEACETIME SOLDIERING" 
f a ■ 

were shining at us. We moved in our own places 
and among our own people, and for a little while 
we were content. 



49 



CHAPTER V 

MARCHING BY NIGHT 

IT is not good to march in the daytime during 
the Macedonian summer. At times, of course, 
it has to be done, but whenever possible marches 
are made by night. There came a day when a 
party of us were ordered to proceed from Hortiack 
to Ambarkoj, and we paraded at five in the after- 
noon, left the camp behind, and came in time to 
the edge of the plateau looking down once more on 
Lake Langaza. The sun was setting as we reached 
the top of the hill; the long shadows were falling 
across the still water, and darkness was gathering 
round Ajvatli, the village which stands, remote 
from the world, on the southern shore of the lake. 
Between us and the village there ran two miles of 
one of the steepest hills that even Macedonia can 
show. We proceeded cautiously down into the 
darkness which seemed to flow upward to receive 
and cover us. Presently all that plateau which had 
been our home for a little while was far above us 
and out of sight as we worked cautiously down to 
the level of the lake — for it is necessary to pro- 

5° 



MARCHING BY NIGHT 

ceed with caution when marching by night in such 
a country, even when a road is provided. 

Newly-arrived troops often find that night 
marching extraordinarily difficult. They expect too 
much from our roads. They give them credit for 
being as the roads of England, and they are grieved 
when their feet come violently in contact with 
rocks, or sink into deep holes. Even if one knows 
the country and its ways it is an awkward business 
at first, but the human animal is wonderfully 
adaptable. How it happens I cannot tell, but in 
course of time one does learn the trick. The feet 
seem to develop an extra sense, and they find their 
way over all sorts of obstacles without disaster, so 
that in the end you can go adventuring over any 
kind of ground in safety. 

But however sure on their feet the men may be, 
you can never be altogether certain what the trans- 
port will do, and going down steep hills by night 
is a strain to find out all the weak places. Our 
particular defect asserted itself before we had got 
half-way down. It lay in the pole which connected 
one half-limber with the other, and without warn- 
ing it tore right out of its socket. Either the wood 
was faulty or it had been badly prepared. What- 
ever the reason, there was the crippled limber with 
half our stores on board, lying across the road, 
while its agitated mules were dancing the tango 
round it. A mule can always be trusted to 

5i 



CAMPAIGN ING IN THE BALKANS 

increase any unpleasantness which may arrive. 

The main body had gone on ahead in happy ig- 
norance of the disaster. I happened to be in com- 
mand of the rearguard, so I was intimately con- 
cerned with the trouble for if we could not get the 
limber on it would be necessary to stay with it all 
night. That is one of the beauties of life in the 
rearguard. It is your business to clear up all the 
litter as you go, and not to move on without it. 

By the time the mules had been dealt with and 
the extent of the damage ascertained, the position 
looked distinctly unpleasant. Limber poles do not 
grow on Macedonian hills. It might have been 
possible to send a man to steal one from a camp 
we had passed some four miles back, but that 
would have meant a delay of at least two hours and 
a half. But one does not need so very many weeks 
in Macedonia to learn the great, consoling lesson 
that the British Army will always see you through 
— always. Never yet have I known it to fail. 
Whatever the occasion, the man who can deal with 
it is there, and I knew that on this occasion, too, 
salvation must be somewhere handy. 

It came in the shape of a fiery little company- 
sergeant-major who had been a transport sergeant 
in France and knew all about limbers and every- 
thing else. He came bustling up and I subsided into 
a kind of lay figure whose sole business it was to 
stand and hold an electric torch in the required 

52 



MARCHING BY NIGHT 

position while the little man obtained ropes from 
mysterious sources, performed strange deeds with 
them and the broken pole, and issued orders at the 
rate of fifty a minute to my command. He was the 
man of the moment, and I was quite content to hold 
the torch for him. You must never interfere with 
the army when it is getting you out of a tangle. If 
you do it may be flustered, or, worse still, offended. 
Just let it alone and wait till the work is done, and 
then events will resume their normal course. 

So at the end of ten violent minutes the little 
man jerked himself upright and saluted. "Ready 
to carry on, sir," he snapped, and the procession 
lumbered forward and downward once more. Ten 
minutes later we met a panic-stricken member of 
the main body who had come back to look for us. 
When you are in charge of all the stores of a com- 
pany, including the mess outfit, you are not likely 
to suffer from neglect. 

If you pass within half a mile of it and can see 
it only by the light of the stars, one village is very 
like another all the world over, and that, perhaps, 
is why I have an idea that Ajvatli must be a very 
nice place. It seemed that it might have been a 
village in England. It was very quiet, with happy 
little lights shining here and there. It was a place 
of homes, and since one could not see them one 
could forget for the moment that the people were 
Macedonian and of uncouth habits. I never saw the 

53 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

place again, so that dim picture remains, a very 
pleasant memory of our journey as we turned and 
made our way westward along the border of the 
lake. 

That was good travelling — night marching at its 
best. There was no attempt at a road, but we 
went smoothly forward over thick, close turf. 
Thorn bushes grew here and there, but there was 
no obstacle in our way. On the right lay the 
smooth black water of the lake, and on the left the 
ground sloped gently upward to the secret darkness 
where lay the hills from whence we had come. The 
air was full of the incessant shrilling of the tree- 
frogs, but the bull-frogs in the lake had absolutely 
nothing to say for themselves, which was a com- 
fort. There was once a man in the camp of some 
little detached post or other in Macedonia who was 
so pestered by the chanting of the bull-frogs in a 
pool close by that he arose at midnight and lobbed 
a Mills grenade into the middle of the concert. 
Most of the frogs were too dead to sing any more 
after that, but the camp was awake half the night 
trying to decide whether or not the remedy was 
worse than the complaint. 

Just by the end of the lake it seemed good to halt 
for a little food, for it was ten o'clock, and we had 
another five or six miles to travel. We had not been 
halted two minutes before the merry fires were 
dancing at the spot the cooks had selected for their 



MARCHING BY NIGHT 



operations, and by that sign you might have real- 
ized, had you been there and known the facts, that 
we were no new-comers in Macedonia. 

For Macedonia is a country in which the betting 
is against your rinding fuel at any halting-place. It 
is true that there are forests here and there, but 
trees are generally very scarce. In some places 
there are bushes and scrub, but very often the camp 
must be pitched on an open plain which grows 
nothing more substantial than thistles. That is the 
time when novices suffer, and especially at night. 
They search miserably and with pain all over the 
place and find in the end no more than a few hand- 
fuls of poor, thin stuff which makes a little blaze 
and flickers out, leaving the water as cold as ever, 
and the prospects of tea as dismally remote. But 
the old hands know better than that. Every bit of 
wood they pass on the march is collected. You will 
see men with long, rough sticks tied to their rifles 
and two or three more in their hands. Sometimes 
almost every man of a platoon will be carrying fire- 
wood, and when the halt is reached it is all handed 
over to the cooks. And on this occasion we had done 
better than usual. The last camp we had passed on 
leaving the plateau must have been the home of a 
very fresh and incautious unit, for they had stacked 
close beside the road a whole pile of bits of packing 
cases, than which there is no better or more desirable 
firewood. The temptation had been too much for our 

55 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

boys, and of course we had seen nothing of what hap- 
pened as we passed, and now their fuel was boiling 
the water of our tea at a splendid rate. 

There was only one drawback to our position on 
the edge of the lake. From the water, attracted by 
the flames, came millions of tiny gnats and midges. 
There were very few mosquitoes, but even so it was 
an uncomfortable business for anyone who is not fond 
of eating gnats with bread and jam or of swallowing 
them in tea. But then Macedonia is no place for peo- 
ple who are too particular. 

We went on again under the same quiet stars for 
mile after easy mile. There was no fatigue in that 
marching, nothing but a little reasonable weariness. 
The men did not sing. Indeed I heard very little sing- 
ing on the march anywhere in the country, and none 
at all from our battalion. But they swung along hap- 
pily enough, chatting and laughing ; there was none of 
that dour silence which tells that the limits of endur- 
ance are being strained. From the distance came the 
little sound of guns, but whether from the Struma or 
the Doiran front it was not easy to say. We were 
too far away, and hills play queer tricks with sound. 

At last the column halted. There did not seem to 
be any particular reason why it should halt. I think 
every one felt equal to a few miles more, but we had 
covered twenty from our starting-point and it was an 
order that we should rest. Some one who had come 
on ahead and arrived while daylight remained led the 

56 



MARCHING BY NIGHT 

different parties to their appointed camping grounds 
and told us where to find the water. Once again ex- 
perience bore witness to itself. With newcomers the 
settling down for the night in the dark is a terrible 
business, and people are rushing to and fro for hours, 
but there was no fuss or delay with our men. Quietly 
and very quickly they made their arrangements with 
no need of supervision. Little fires sprang up along 
their lines and one could catch glimpses of them as they 
lay, some huddled together, some separately, smoking 
a final cigarette. But for us the day was by no means 
over. There were only the five of us, officers of the one 
company, and the mess president, aided and abetted 
by the cook, had decreed that we should have dinner 
when we arrived. Already the cook was very busy 
with pots and pans round his fire, and one of the serv- 
ants was spreading a cloth on the ground and arrang- 
ing packs round it for us to sit on. The company 
commander was trying to write some report or other 
with the aid of an electric torch, and swearing dis- 
tressfully at the same time, when we became aware of 
an approaching radiance. It was another of the serv- 
ants, bringing up the lamp to which we had treated 
ourselves during that little spell of luxury at Hortiack. 
A beautiful oil lamp it was, with glass and globe com- 
plete, and we had been very proud of it. But we im- 
agined that it had been left behind. Glass chimneys 
and globes are not the sort of things to travel securely 
in limbers. 

57 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALK ANS 

"Where on earth did you get that thing from?" 
asked our astonished commander. 

"We just brought it along, sir," replied the man, 
and it took a whole string of questions to bring out the 
fact that one of the servants had carried the lamp, an- 
other the chimney and another the globe in their hands 
for the whole twenty miles. They had their rifles and 
all their equipment. They had also, you may be very 
sure, their share of the looted bits of packing cases, 
and yet they had brought these things all the way. 
The British Tommy is an incalculable person. Those 
three, it seemed, were as proud of that lamp as we had 
been. They wanted it to go shining vaingloriously over 
Macedonia and to fill the members of other messes 
with envy, so they "just brought it along," and they 
carried it afterwards over very many miles of that 
uneasy land, till misfortune and a thunderstorm met it 
at Lahana. 

The air was utterly still, and the lamp looked very 
pleasant burning there so brightly under the stars with 
our cutlery arranged on the cloth around it. I have 
had dinner at some curious hours, but I don't think I 
had ever had it at two in the morning before, yet it 
seemed more like the end of the day than near the 
beginning, such was the magic of that pleasant night. 
And it was a very excellent dinner, for we had some 
store of our little luxuries, so there were soup, fish 
(out of a tin), stewed steak, peaches and coffee, and 
we had some whiskey and a few bottles of Perrier. 



MA RCHING BY NIGHT 

It is possible to be quite comfortable in Macedonia so 
long as you are near any source of supplies. The 
trouble is that you are usually so far from anything 
of the kind that it is only possible to dream of the 
things you would like to eat and drink and smoke. 

But that was a special kind of night altogether, one 
of those happy times when all goes well. No one 
seemed in a hurry to go to bed, and when at last I lay 
wrapped in my blankets under the stars, it seemed 
almost a pity to go to sleep. The tree-frogs were riot- 
ing in an orchard of pomegranates, figs and apricots 
just behind me, but there was nothing unpleasant at 
that hour in their shrill calling. The North Star was 
lower in the sky than it had any business to be, but 
there was the sense of certainty that presenly I should 
reurn to my home and all those things from which I 
was parted for a little while. The distant guns were 
whispering through the air, but they only spoke of 
that day when peace shall surely come again to visit 
and dwell upon the earth. 

Far beyond me rose the line of the Seres road and 
there were the lights of the ambulances as they came 
rushing down with their burden of broken men. 



59 



CHAPTER VI 

CONCERNING WATER 

THERE are quite a number of riddles to be 
solved when troops are moving about Mace- 
donia, and the most constant of them all is 
that of the water supply. There is plenty of water in 
the land — in winter there is far too much — but it hides 
away in the most irritating fashion, and it has a habit 
of running in undesirable places. Water usually means 
mosquitoes, and it is necessary to avoid mosquitoes as 
far as possible if we are to have any army left in 
the country. 

In summer most of the rivers dry up. If they are 
really large and important rivers they may keep a little 
trickle of water running, but it is hardly more than a 
trickle. The Galika, for instance, is quite an impos- 
ing affair when rain is falling. Frequently it cannot 
be content with one channel but carves itself out two 
or three in addition to turning wide areas into swamp. 
But when summer comes it dries up to such an extent 
that only the scantiest driblet of water connects the 
little pools which remain to mark its course. There 
are, on the other hand, a few little streams among the 

60 



CONCERNING WATER 

mountains which flow fairly steadily all the time, but 
these are usually fed direct from springs. 

The springs themselves are curious. A geologist 
would probably find all sorts of interesting things in 
the country if he were to visit it, and work out the 
connection between all these little underground rivers. 
It is certain that there must be a whole series of such 
hidden streams. Over and over again one finds springs 
which well out of the rock, tumble into a little age- 
worn basin, and vanish. There is nowhere any trace 
of a stream. The water comes into the light of day 
for a moment and slips away out of sight. Very 
probably it comes flowing out from under another rock 
miles away, pretending that it comes from an entirely 
different spring. It would be interesting to go round 
the country with a few gallons of Condy's fluid, treat- 
ing these vanishing springs to a dash of color, and then 
watching to see where the decoration reappeared. 

Certainly this vanishing habit has made things very 
awkward for the army. Spring water, when it comes 
direct from the filtering rock, is usually pure and fit 
for drinking. Especially at times of stress and emer- 
gency, there would be a tendency to allow the drinking 
of such water without restrictions. But when it is 
realized that what appears to be a spring may be merely 
a mouth of a subterranean stream, it is another matter. 
Higher up in its course that same stream may have 
rippled through the filth of a Macedonian village. Its 
water may be loaded with micro-organisms which will 

61 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

do terrible things to the stomach of the soldier and 
render him useless to the army for months. When 
these things were realized the authorities began to take 
the water-supply of Macedonia very seriously indeed, 
and the various medical officers were told that they 
must be very careful about it. For that, if for no 
other reason, I should hate to be a Medical Officer. 

The battalion tramps into a new camp, hot and 
dusty from a long march and very, very thirsty. Theo- 
retically, a supply of guaranteed water should have 
been brought on from the last halt, but that theory 
breaks down sometimes. There are the crowds of ex- 
ceedingly thirsty men, and there is a beautiful, clean- 
looking spring. Between the two stands the M.O. 
with a nasty little case full of tubes and bottles and 
similar rubbish, and proceeds to make a test, That test 
takes half an hour to accomplish. 

Of course we know that it is necessary. Any man 
with any sense will admit as much, especially when 
he is not thirsty. We know that there may be perils 
innumerable lurking in that innocent water, and most 
of us have been too near to dysentery at one time or 
another since we came to the country to desire any 
closer acquaintance. But one is apt to be unreason- 
able after twenty miles of Macedonia, if the sun has 
been shining most of the time. Egged on by the crav- 
ing body, the brain forgets its caution and hints that 
even if there is a bit of risk the odds are against any- 
thing happening, and anyhow the water looks per- 

62 



CONCERNING WATER 

" mi. i ^ 

fectly good — any one who has ever been in a similar 
position can imagine the course of that mental dis- 
turbance. 

So quite naturally there arises a hatred and scorn 
and loathing of the Medical Officer. He is seen to be 
a pedant of the worst type, a bigoted follower of the 
rule of thumb, a person without discernment or power 
of independent thought. Moreover he is not content 
with keeping us waiting. Not content with testing 
the water, he must needs be chlorinating it. His min- 
ions throw evil powders into it, so that the good sweet 
water becomes vile and an offence to the palate. We 
can even taste it in the tea, and we spend a hearty half- 
hour in reviling science, and above all, its nearest ex- 
ponent. Yes, I am quite sure that I do not want to 
be a Medical Officer. 

But even this chlorinating business is not the whole 
of the trouble. It does quite frequently happen 
that there are two springs to serve the camp, one 
near at hand and disreputable, and the other far 
away and tolerable. The doctor decides that the water 
from the far spring must be used, and immediately 
earns some more unpopularity. He is unpopular with 
the men who are told off to guard the forbidden spring 
and have to stay there all day long scaring thirsty peo- 
ple away. He is unpopular with the men in charge of 
the water mules who have to keep tramping to and fro 
for a mile, or it may be a mile and a half, to bring water 
for the varied needs of the battalion. And more than 

63 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

ever is he unpopular with those who are told that they 
cannot have any water yet because the mules have not 
come up. Any man who goes looking for popularity is 
a fool, but a man who is compelled to attract such an 
amount of unpopularity is to be pitied, whatever his 
faults may be. Yet these things have to be done, that 
His Majesty's forces may deal the more effectually with 
His Majesty's enemies. 

When drinking water has been arranged for there 
still remains the business of washing, and this is fre- 
quently quite as difficult a question. Really there are 
times when one cannot understand how our men in 
Macedonia contrive to keep so clean. It is bad enough 
for an officer. Requiring a tub he sends his servant off 
to find some water. Having no more than two hands, 
the man cannot well contrive to bring more than two 
canvas buckets back with him, and quite possibly he has 
had to carry even that amount nearly a mile. With a 
couple of buckets of course one can do something. 
Even half a bucket will go quite a long way if you are 
careful with it, but there is no solid satisfaction in 
such a tub. At the best it is only a makeshift. 

But if the officer with his buckets finds the problem 
difficult, how does the soldier manage? He has no 
bucket. Most probably the only available water is in 
a mean little stream which he must share with a few 
hundreds of his comrades. With that meagre supply 
he must do all his washing and shaving, and also wash 
his clothes. Whether there is another army in the 

6 4 



CONCERNING WATER 

world which would keep clean under the circumstances 
I do not know ; probably most of them would not even 
try, but our men try, and succeed. 

Outside of Salonika I only found one place in Mace- 
donia where one could get a real bath. That was at 
the standing camp of Janes. Having a plentiful sup- 
ply of water, the officers of the camp decided to fix 
up a place for washing, and they did it well. There are 
big tubs in which one can wallow with extreme joy, 
and there are showerbaths as well. Places are provided 
for men as well as for officers, and there is a separate 
department for washing clothes. When in our wander- 
ings we halted by that camp for a time and were in- 
formed that we might use the baths the battalion nearly 
went mad with joy, and there was a waiting list for 
every bathing parade, while clothes were being washed 
all day long. 

Yet if proper baths were scarce, it was occasionally 
possible for people who were really interested in the 
matter to clean themselves thoroughly. It all depended 
on their power of using their opportunities to the best 
advantage. 

We came one day to a camp which was pitched in 
the middle of a hot, blistering plain. There we re- 
mained for five days. In the morning and the eve- 
ning we did short marches or a little drill, but through 
all the scalding hours of the middle of the day we 
could do nothing but lie in our bivouacs and gasp for 
breath. It happened that on our second day in the 

65 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BA LKANS 

place I found a quiet little stream, and I mentioned 
the fact to one of the others who had been in the coun- 
try a few months longer. Without asking any more 
questions he sent his servant for a couple of shovels, 
and when they arrived, commanded me to lead him to 
the place. 

The stream ran in a bed which it had carved for 
itself at the foot of some tall cliffs. They were so 
high and followed such a course that the blazing sun 
could not reach that little rivulet of water, but it flowed 
very happily in the cool shadow. It was quite a tiny 
affair, nowhere more than three inches deep, and at 
the widest it was not more than three feet across. 
But we had those shovels, and our own intense desire 
for a bath. 

It is as well to remember that, however small a 
stream may be, it is bringing down fresh water all 
the time and will eventually fill up any cavity it 
reaches and sweep away all the mud you may stir up. 
We set to work with those shovels and began to dig 
great holes right in the bed of our little stream. 

It made a vast commotion. We were throwing 
gravel and mud and stones to left and right. All the 
little minnows swam away in terror, and a crab which 
we disinterred made frantic attempts to hide itself 
under a rock, but we went on scooping and scraping 
and excavating, always with a careful eye on our own 
dimensions. If you buy a ready-made house you have 
to be content with the baths which the builder has 

66 



CONCERNING WATER 

installed, unless you are very rich and can afford to 
have them replaced by your own size in baths. But 
if you make your own bath you can make it to fit your- 
self. You can make it long and broad and deep enough, 
and to prevent mistakes you can try it on while it is 
being made. 

So we dug our baths, and the stream brought us 
down an incessant supply of fresh water. A very few 
minutes after we had finished our scraping and shovel- 
ling we had each a great, clear pool, and we proceeded 
to enjoy ourselves. It is a great experience to sit in 
water up to your neck when for months you have had 
to make shift with a sponge. And the experience is 
more wonderful still when you know that outside your 
little patch of shade there is the tormenting heat of 
the sun at noon. We sat there for hours, revelling in 
the caress of the cool water, jumping out now and 
then to bask in the sun, and returning once more to 
the touch of the running stream. When at last we 
returned to the camp it was with the consciousness 
that we were thoroughly and effectually clean, and we 
felt very superior to all the unfortunate people who 
had not known what it was to steep themselves in real 
water for months. 

Our superiority was short-lived, of course. Others 
found that secret little stream, and we had no copy- 
right in the bath-digging idea. Two days later the 
stream was a series of holes and in every hole a soldier 
splashed and soaked and smiled. The only advantage 

67 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

that we gained was that, being the first on the scene, 
we were allowed to keep our places at the head of the 
stream and so were not obliged to wallow in the mud 
and soap-suds sent down by other people. 

But if you want a hot bath in Macedonia there is 
only one thing to do. You must contrive to get so ill 
or so badly hurt that you are sent into hospital. 



68 



CHAPTER VII 

OUR HOUSES AND TIN 

WHEN one is young the snail often appears to 
be an enviable beast. It seems such a jolly- 
idea to wear your house on your back, and 
to be able to move without difficulty into the next street 
every time the neighbors start disliking you. It is a 
pity that we have to grow up and put away childish 
things. If they only retained that youthful envy of 
the snail the soldiers of the Salonika armies would be 
quite happy about the fact that they actually do carry 
their houses on their backs, but they are adult and dis- 
illusioned men, and I did not meet one who was really 
glad to have realized that dream. 

To be sure our houses had little in common with the 
snug, weather-proof residence of the snail. They con- 
sisted simply of bivouac sheets, together with such 
sticks or other supports as we could manage to acquire 
in the course of our wanderings. A bivouac sheet is 
a piece of material furnished with eyelet holes, button- 
holes and buttons, and it is theoretically rainproof. 
Many things which are supposed to be rainproof lose 
their reputations when they are exposed to Macedonian 

6 9 



CAMPAIGNI NG IN THE BALKANS 

storms, and anyhow our sheets had seen plenty of 
active service and they were getting tired of it. They 
were not even showerproof. 

Each man carries a sheet, and when a new camp is 
reached he conspires with a comrade to make a house. 
Architecture is a simple matter. Two uprights are 
driven into the ground and a cross-bar lashed to the 
top of them. Over this the two sheets are flung but- 
toned together so as to make one long sheet. The free 
ends are pegged to the ground, and the result is a little 
triangular canvas tunnel in which two men may lie 
side by side or one, if he is very careful, may sit up- 
right. If the two try to sit upright at the same time 
the house usually falls down. The edifice is, of course, 
open at each end unless they are very short men who 
can afford to leave enough to lap over and join at one 
end, when the place becomes a cave instead of a tun- 
nel. Old soldiers learn in time the trick of acquiring 
an extra sheet, and with three sheets between two men 
a very tolerable little place can be made, but there is 
the disadvantage that some one has to carry the extra 
sheet. 

The officer is, of course, a little better off. He is 
not compelled to share his tunnel with anybody else, 
and the number of sheets which he owns is only lim- 
ited by the ingenuity of his servant or the weight of 
his kit. Also he does not have to construct the house 
himself — though many officers find it necessary to lend 
a hand, for the really good servant is a rare bird. But 

70 



OUR HOUSES AND TIN 



in all other respects he is on terms of perfect equality 
with the men, and if a storm arrives he is as thorough- 
ly soaked as any of them. He, too, has to solve the 
problem of turning over in bed without wrecking his 
home. He, too, must abandon dignity when he wants to 
go indoors and enter crawling warily on hands and 
knees. And when the occasional whirlwind approaches, 
he, too, must cling to his dwelling, and hold on with 
might and main lest the whole affair go dancing over 
the crest of the local mountain to hide in some remote 
valley. 

For a real house rock is, of course, an admirable 
foundation, but it is quite another matter when you 
are trying to raise an erection of canvas and sticks, 
and the fact that Macedonia is largely composed of 
rocks is not the least of the troubles of the bivouac 
builder. The uprights and the pegs cannot be driven 
into the ground. There may be a thin layer of soil, 
but it is not enough to hold them if it begins to blow, 
and you are painfully conscious that the whole affair 
is ready to collapse at the first opportunity. You go 
round it, tenderly and lovingly, seeking to strengthen 
it where you may, but when all is done the thing is as 
frail as a card castle. But the ingenuity of the British 
soldier is unfailing. Once in the days of my ignor- 
ance I had been putting up my bivouac by myself and 
striving valiantly to drive home-made pegs into marble 
of superior quality. My servant had been delayed, 
but when I was perspiring irritably and trying to think 

7i 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

of appropriate things to say, he appeared and took 
charge of the situation. Instead of trying to drive 
pegs into the ground, he organized a system of anchors. 
The uprights were stayed by cords fastened round 
great lumps of rock. More lumps of rock took the 
place of pegs, until the whole was made generously 
secure, and he went about the task of arranging the 
furniture with an honest endeavor to hide his opinion 
that I was a foolish person who should never have been 
allowed so far away from home. I left him to it, and 
went away to watch where the shells were bursting 
along the ridge of a little hill just by Doiran. When I 
returned the place was ready for me to take posses- 
sion. 

Camp furniture in Macedonia is rudimentary. In 
England the newly-gazetted subaltern buys many beau- 
tiful things made of wood and Willesden canvas If 
he is wise he leaves them in England; if he carries 
them as far as Salonika he will have to leave them 
there. Camp beds, baths, tables and chairs are pleas- 
ant things to own, but there is not enough transport 
to carry them round the country. He will be firmly 
discouraged if he tries to take with him anything but a 
canvas bucket. 

Even so, a great deal can be done to make a bivouac 
look like a home ; it all depends on the sort of servant 
you find. Mine was a very wonderful person. He 
would set out the shaving tackle, the two or three 
books, and the other scanty odds a»d ends, all ar- 

72 



OUR HOUSES AND T IN 

ranged on boxes which he always seemed able to find. 
Somehow (one does not inquire into these matters) he 
acquired a big piece of canvas and stitched it up into a 
long bag which he stuffed with dry grass and made 
into a most admirable mattress. And also, wherever 
we went, he had a knack of discovering sheets of 
corrugated iron wherewith to enlarge and strengthen 
the sides of the house. That is the final proof of the 
expert in Macedonia — the power to find corrugated 
iron when no one else can find any. It is the most 
desirable substance. If you can find enough of it, 
you can make yourself a dwelling into which the rain 
cannot enter, which the wind will not greatly disturb. 
You can make a little palace for the mess and 
arrange shelter for the cook-house so that the 
weather will not disturb the due order of the meals. 
Given enough corrugated iron — known throughout 
the country and in all the rest of this book as "tin," 
you can make yourself really comfortable. 

In the beginning I suppose the tin came to Salonika 
addressed either to the Engineers or to the Army Serv- 
ice Corps (to whom the good things of life do habitu- 
ally and automatically address themselves). Probably 
it was sent out by trustful people in official positions 
who imagined that it would all be used for holding up 
the sides of trenches, aiding in the construction of 
bomb-proof shelters, or building stores for perishable 
goods and, perhaps, little huts for favored brigadiers. 
But when the army started housekeeping on those hills 

73 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

and found that there were to be no tents because they 
were too heavy to be carried about, it began to realize 
the possibilities of tin. Ever since then the Engineers 
and other people who have some sort of official right 
to the stuff have been finding themselves compelled to 
send for more, and yet more of it, for their stocks do 
so consistently and mysteriously vanish. 

You cannot hide a store of tin from battalions who 
have been long enough in the land to learn the value 
of it. Some one will ferret out the secret, and those 
precious sheets will vanish. Once we were camping 
among the hills, far enough from everywhere and every 
one for three weeks. Soon after our arrival we dis- 
covered three miles away a little hut which seemed to 
have been put up at some time or other as a signal 
station. All we were concerned about was that no one 
had been left to take care of it, and a couple of limbers 
very quickly transferred it to our camp where it was 
re-erected and made a very superior mess for our com- 
pany. At the end of three weeks we had to go off on 
trek, on another spirited attempt to find the war. We 
knew that we should only be gone a little while, so 
we took the hut to pieces and hid the sheets, as we 
thought, quite cleverly. We were gone just a week, 
and when we returned every strip of tin had vanished, 
but down in a valley a mile away the officers of a de- 
tachment of pioneers offered us hospitality in a hut 
whose roof and walls were entirely familiar. It is a 
little difficult to accuse your hosts of stealing your 

74 



OUR HOUSES AND TIN 

»&i' J 1 "'"; 1 ... ,.',;, ,..^ ^ l r^'■^:■^^ ":■■; ■ •■' ■■, ■■ - , : ■■j — ! :,'■, , ,. ' , Tr- 

house, especially when you stole it yourself in the first 
place. The only remedy open to us was to find and 
annex another stack of the precious sheets. 

The result of this blending of tin and bivouac sheets 
is to give the average camp a terribly disreputable ap- 
pearance. I reached the land from England by way 
of Egypt. In Egypt we had had all the tents we 
needed, and our camps looked very nice out there on 
the edge of the desert. It had not occurred to us that 
you could have a camp without tents. They were as 
much a matter of course as the adjutant or the bat- 
talion postman. But when I reached the camp among 
the Macedonian mountains there was a revelation wait- 
ing for me. Not one tent was to be seen anywhere. 
There were only the rows of the tiny bivouacs, and the 
orderly room and the mess and all the other important 
places were just huts built of rusty corrugated iron, 
looking for all the world as if they had strayed out of 
a patch of allotment gardens at home. The whole 
affair looked so shabby that one wanted to go off and 
apologize to somebody for it. 

But presently bugles were calling down the lines and 
the men came out, and presently the battalion was on 
parade. They stood there in shirt-sleeves and khaki 
shorts, the summer drill order of the Salonika armies. 
Their arms and their bare knees were burned as brown 
as their faces, and their equipment was frayed and 
worn but easy-fitting, and worn with an accustomed 
air. When they marched off they went with the care- 

75 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

less, confident swing of men who have learnt to dis- 
regard the miles, who have learnt and are masters of 
their trade. And one realized that the peculiar ap- 
pearance of the camp had nothing whatever to do with 
the business, that this curious cross-bred product of 
a gipsy caravan and a market garden was the home of 
real soldiers. 

Later one learnt how swiftly those curious camps of 
ours could be struck and pitched again. Pitching a 
camp in England was always such a long, laborious 
business. The lines had to be marked out with in- 
finite care, and the tents could only be raised with the 
aid of all sorts of sergeant-majors and similarly au- 
thoritative persons. But with these queer little can- 
vas houses and these perfectly trained men, there was 
no confusion, no delay. Ordered to move off, each 
man packed his share of his dwelling in his valise with 
the rest of his goods. Ordered to halt and encamp, the 
bivouacs rose as by magic in neat, comely ranks and 
their inhabitants proceeded to make themselves at 
home. 

Of course it often happened that we reached the 
camping ground too late, or were to stay there too 
short a while to put up bivouacs, and then every one 
slept in the open with only the sky for a roof. It is a 
very excellent way of sleeping, but there are just two 
drawbacks. In the first place, the sun does occasion- 
ally get up before the soldier needs to rise, and he 
awakens all the myriad insects of the land which in 

76 



OUR HOUSES AND TIN 

their turn proceed to arouse every sleeper within their 
radius. And in the second place it does sometimes 
begin to rain in the night, and a man who can sleep 
with drops of rain pattering on his face is a bit of 
a curiosity among such a roof-sheltered race as ours. 
In winter, of course, things are very different, but 
then in winter the troops are not moved about the 
country with the apparently aimless gaiety which is 
the rule in summer. They stay long enough in one 
place to make more enduring habitations, and there is 
a great digging and building as dug-outs and shelters 
are prepared. On the line between Salamanli and 
Dudular there are some wonderful dwellings to be 
seen, carved into the side of a cliff, and fitted with 
doors and windows, and photographs of these and 
similar luxuries have appeared in the papers from 
time to time. But I have never yet seen a photograph 
to illustrate the accident which befell a friend of mine 
down by Jerakaru. His dug-out had been constructed 
without sufficient study of the habits of the local floods. 
It was a nice dug-out, with a good, high sleeping shelf, 
and he was very proud of it. But there came a night 
of rain, and in the morning when he awoke he found 
that he had the option of staying in bed till the flood 
subsided or taking a plunge into about four feet of 
icy water in which all his possessions were swimming 
disconsolately round his home. That is the kind of 
thing which is liable to happen to any one stationed on 
low-lying ground in the rainy months, and to be flooded 

77 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

out of your camp is just a part of the routine. If it 
does nothing else it adds to the appreciation of the 
rum ration. 



7* 



CHAPTER VIII 

RATIONS AND THE DUMP 

GOING to the war in Macedonia is not an ex- 
citing business, because there is so much 
Macedonia and so little war. There are not many 
of the quick alarms which are supposed to haunt 
the soldier day and night. It is true that the guns 
keep pounding away, but there is so much room 
for the shells to fall and burst without hurting any 
one. Even on patrol actions, those nocturnal 
amusements of the people on the Struma, the man 
v/ho gets hit is usually more astonished than any- 
thing else. A party of our men had been out doing 
some searching of the ground on the other side 
of the river one day last summer. They had had 
a few shots fired at them, but no one had been 
touched, and they returned at last to their de- 
fences and the officer in charge of them found his 
company commander having tea at the door of 
his dug-out. He sat down, with his back towards 
the river, to have a cup and to make his report. 
Suddenly he rose to his feet. "I'm hit," he said 
quietly, and walked off to the dressing station, 

79 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

while the others stared. But it was quite true. 
Some enterprising Bulgar far away on the other 
side of the river had fired a shot at random, high 
in the air ; it had caught him in the back, and gone 
clean through his body, and when I went to see 
him in hospital he was still puzzling over it. "J ust 
think of it !" he said. "I was through some of the 
hottest of the shows in France in the first year 
and never got a scratch, and now I get plugged 
while I'm sitting down having tea! What can 
you call such rotten luck as that?" 

Whatever else you may call it, it does not seem 
much like war as we have known it on the Western 
front. It is just the kind of irritating thing which 
does happen in Macedonia, and it is hard to say 
anything else about it. He had not even the con- 
solation of being hit in the ordinary course of 
duty, and he was intensely annoyed. And that 
mood of intense annoyance is one which becomes 
very familiar after a few months in the country. 
It seems so desperately futile. There is the war 
to be attended to. One joined the army and learnt 
numerous strange lessons in the hope of being 
allowed to help to attend to it. One came to this 
exceedingly uncouth land in great joy, feeling that 
at last the chance had come and that all the many 
months of training were to have their fulfilment. 
Also one is in the presence of the enemy. It is 
possible to sit, as I have sat many a day, on the 

80 



RATIONS AND THE DUMP 



hiils above the Struma and look at Bulgars through 
field-glasses. Those are the people whom it is one's 
business to vex, to harass, and destroy. Back in 
the camp are the keen-eyed, eager men with their 
carefully tended rifles and their sure, steady hands 
and their constant burden of ammunition, and they, 
too, are annoyed, for nothing is given them to do 
but to make roads, to dig trenches, and to put up 
barbed wire in places which it does not seem 
humanly possible that the enemy can ever reach. 
We all appear to be as remote from the task we 
wanted to undertake as when we were still in 
England, and perhaps our annoyance is not to be 
wondered at. Swords may not have been beaten 
into ploughshares in Macedonia last summer, but 
bayonets were pretty generally put aside for pick- 
axes, to the intense disgust of their owners. Of 
course we knew nothing of the plans of the higher 
commanders. We could only see the things within 
the circle of our own horizon; we could only note 
what happened to us from time to time and draw 
our own conclusions from those happenings. Every 
now and then some order would come which 
seemed to indicate that at last we were going to 
fight, and we would forget to be annoyed for a 
little while. But in a very few minutes some pes- 
simist would come along with the remark which 
we learned to hate and to dread more than any 
other arrangement of words — "The A.S.C. say that 

81 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

if we do advance, they can't feed us." That sen- 
tence was the passing-bell of our hopes over and 
over ~^ain, and when we read in papers sent out 
from home that we were sure to do something be- 
fore long, we used to say it to ourselves once more, 
and subside into blasphemous silence. 

In every matter save that of food and ammuni- 
tion we were, I suppose, as mobile a force as 
any leader could desire. The Salonika armies un- 
derstand moving about with the least possible 
delay. Trained to the country, accustomed to 
march as well by night as by day, carrying our 
houses on our backs, we needed only to be fed and 
to be supplied with ammunition. But that was the 
difficulty, and the conclusion of the whole matter. 

Wherever he goes the soldier takes with him 
his emergency ration, the little tin of meat, the 
other little tin which contains tea and sugar, and 
the handful of biscuits. He carries these things 
about with him, but he does not eat them. Some- 
where or other in my kit is a much-traveled tin of 
bully beef that has been to see all sorts of queer 
places in Egypt, has wandered over most of the 
map of Macedonia, and visited quite a number of 
hospitals on the way home, and that is the proper 
way to treat an emergency ration. All the time 
you have it you know that you are assured against 
starvation, so you must keep it and never eat it, 
under pain of dreadful penalties, for it is only de- 

82 



RATIONS AND THE DUMP 

signed to last for one day, and when that is over 
you are finished altogether. 

If some one could invent a new kind of soldier 
who could carry with him a week's supply of food 
in addition to all his other tackle, we should have 
a new kind of war immediately, but as it is, the 
man must be within reasonable distance of his 
supplies. And that means that wherever he goes 
there must be a dump somewhere fairly close be- 
hind him. If you are told to proceed to any new 
place, the first question is always "Where is the 
dump?" Water can always be found somewhere 
or other, and you have the doctor with his box of 
tubes and powders to make it fit for you to drink. 
Fire and shelter you can provide for yourself out 
of what you may find and the burdens which you 
carry, but unless you can find a dump you will be 
lost. For as I have pointed out in an earlier 
chapter, it is not possible for an army to live on 
the land in Macedonia. 

A dump, as its name more or less indicates, is 
a place where things are dumped. It consists, to 
the outward eye, of a collection of tents and mar- 
quees which live in a constant whirling confusion 
of motor lorries and limbers. In the marquees 
and around them are mountainous piles of packing 
cases and other matters which are constantly being 
built up and do as constantly melt away and vanish, 
while between them agitated men run to and fro 

S3 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

with little note-books, pencils and bits of carbon 
paper. You might not think as you stood watch- 
ing their frenzied evolutions that they were en- 
gaged in winning the war, but that is very literally 
and exactly their business in life, and they are doing 
their best to carry it out. 

Really it is time that people stopped throwing 
bricks at the Army Service Corps, and I say so 
with the more sincerity because I have thrown a few 
myself in my time. It is true that they always 
have the best kind of jam in their messes, and 
that they never run short of Ideal milk. It 
is true that they usually manage to keep them- 
selves supplied with fresh meat, that their teeth 
are unaccustomed to wrestle with biscuits while 
there is a loaf of bread in the land, and that ration 
rum reaches them in generous measure — but is 
there one among us all who would not take similar 
care of himself if he had half a chance? When 
I was in the ranks we used to sing insulting 
ballads to A.S.C. men whenever they appeared, 
such as — 

"With the Middlesex in the firing line 
And the Queen's in support behind them, 
But when we look for the A.S.C. 
I'm hanged if we can find them." 

In these and other ways we did our best to ex- 
plain our deep conviction that the A.S.C. had noth- 

8 4 



RATIONS AND THE DUMP 

ing whatever to do with the war, that they were 
pampered aristocrats who dwelt in luxury and idle- 
ness among the jam. tins far behind the line, and 
did nothing all day long but conspire together to 
rob the poor soldier of his rations. But no one 
who has been in Macedonia for any length of time 
is likely to perpetuate those insults, even in jest. 
We are more likely to give thanks that it was not 
our fate to get into their ranks, and to pay them a very 
honest tribute of admiration and gratitude. 

This is a digression, but it was necessary. And 
now it might be as well to return to the dump, and 
to explain just what those agitated men have to 
do. Obviously it would be a complicated business 
to send out motors from Salonika every day with 
the stores for the separate units which have to be 
supplied. It is much easier to send out the stuff 
in bulk and to distribute it as close to the line as 
possible, and for that purpose the dump is estab- 
lished. 

A place is chosen which has to satisfy three con- 
ditions. The first is that it must be connected 
with Salonika by the best available road, so that 
there may be the least possible delay in keeping it 
supplied with stores. The second condition is that 
it must be as close as possible to the advanced line 
of troops, and the third that it must be in a posi- 
tion which can be reached easily and safely by 
the units which it is to supply. When such a spot 

85 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

has been found the preparations are made and the 
tents and marquees are put up. Lorries come 
trundling over the skyline laden with all those 
things which go to make up the meals of the 
soldier on active service, together with the food 
for the innumerable mules and for the occasional 
horse. As it comes up each lorry hurls out its 
load of packing cases or sacks or bales, and they 
are received by busy, grimy men and piled in the 
positions ordained for them while the lorries 
trundle back for more. There rises a mountain of 
the meat which journeys to the front in tins. Close 
by will be arranged a pile of huge sections of 
dead animals decorously arrayed in sackcloth, while 
sacks of onions and potatoes close at hand suggest 
the army's affection for stew. A little further on 
will be the cases of condensed milk, tea, sugar and 
jam, and all the time bread will be arriving from 
those excellent bakeries which are hidden in the 
little valleys round Salonika. Scattered among the 
chief mountains will be the lesser mounds of those 
various small delicacies which are given to us from 
time to time for the greater comfort of our bodies 
and the increased valor of our souls. 

Having got all these nice things so nicely ar- 
ranged, and having written a great deal about them 
in his little books, you might think that the A.S.C. 
man deserved to be allowed to sit down and admire 
the result for a little while, but he is not permitted 

86 



RATIONS AND THE DUMP 

such luxury. A dump is not a museum. Before 
the last lorry has got rid of its load, the empty 
limbers are rattling down from the opposite direc- 
tion, bringing with them men armed with docu- 
ments and desires. They come from the big camps, 
and from, remote secret places where little detached 
parties are busy. They come on behalf of the 
men in the front line trenches, and of those others 
who are stealthily constructing works on distant, 
hidden hillsides. The documents support their 
claim to rations for so many men and animals. 
They are checks which must be cashed in meat 
and bread and fodder. 

There are printed works on the subject of ra- 
tions. In those works you may learn exactly what 
the soldier has a right to receive, what must be 
given to his mule, and what are the demands of a 
charger of over sixteen hands. If you gave me 
all those works and a pencil and a great many 
sheets of paper and left me alone for half an hour, 
I might be able to tell you at the end of the time 
what should be given to a man who demanded, 
say, sustenance for a hundred and fifty men and 
seventy mules. But the A.S.C. man is a profes- 
sional. He has been at the job a long time and 
he knows the answer to all the sums, nor does 
he need to work them out. He glances at the 
document which each man brings and gives his 
orders, and the cases fly into the empty limbers 

87 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

till they are subdued and sluggish under the weight, 
and crawl thoughtfully out on the way home. 

It is a dizzy, bewildering business watching a 
dump when everything is going at full pressure. 
There will be a string of motor lorries for some 
big, distant camp, threading through the mounds 
of stuff and taking toll from each. Mixed with 
them will be the limbers, the puzzled, rebellious 
mules, and the men whose uneasy business it is 
to control the mules. Everyone is working very 
feverishly and the whole looks like unreasonable 
confusion. But as a matter of fact there is no 
confusion ; it is all going quite smoothly, and every- 
body knows what he is doing. 

For wise battalions — and most battalions ac- 
quire wisdom after a little time in Macedonia — 
do not send novices to the dump. The novices 
certainly get the things they were sent for, be- 
cause they hand in their documents and the A.S.C. 
men do the rest, but men accustomed to the job 
sometimes get better stuff. If, for instance, there 
is only a limited supply of fresh meat, and the 
rest of the day's issue must be bully beef, the old 
hand can frequently throw in a word which will 
obtain the fresh meat for his unit. Undisturbed 
by the tumult, knowing exactly what he wants 
and what he is entitled to have, he makes his way 
round the marquees and does obtain, within the 
limits, the pick of the available stuff. 

88 



RATIONS AND THE DUMP 

Satisfied at last the limbers go rolling and 
bumping back through the valleys and over the 
hills to their homes where the load they carry 
must be shared out, so much to each company, so 
much to the transport, so much to the officers. It 
is quite certain, of course, that everyone will 
grumble. The army always grumbles, but it is 
so much a habit that no feelings are hurt and the 
injured expressions do not reveal any genuine or 
deep-rooted discontent. And really there is not 
often much to grumble about. 

It is all very simple, of course, and there are 
the times when the day's rations will consist of 
very little but a tin of bully, biscuits, tea and sugar, 
but even then there may be jam, and there is a 
deal of excitement to be gained out of the business 
of eating one of those biscuits with jam unless 
your teeth are in absolutely first-class order. One 
learns in a very little while to regard the absence 
of butter with indifference, and I fancy that quite 
a number of our men will come back protesting 
against the milk which comes direct from the cow 
and demanding instead those brands which come 
from the grocer's in tins. The one thing which 
we did miss and urgently desire was sauce — all 
kinds of sauce. If you can treat bully beef to 
a dash of Worcester or something of that kind it 
goes down so much better, and this is a hint which 
anyone with friends or relations in the Salonika 

89 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

forces may take. If you are making up parcels, 
include something which will give a zest to plain 
fare, sauces, relishes, pickles — all such articles will 
be more than welcome. 



go 



CHAPTER IX 

HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS 

WHEN the war is over and those of us who 
are left come back once more and meet to- 
gether and talk over our experiences there is likely 
to be some comparing of hardships and discom- 
forts endured. For my own part I think that it 
is possible that those who were through the first 
winter in France and the first year of the campaign 
in Mesopotamia really had the worst of it. But 
we have known a little about discomfort in Mace- 
donia too. There is a place called Guvezne. . . . 
Guvezne is a village, but for army purposes it 
gives its name to a considerable tract of country 
round — country which is not far from being the 
most detestable in the whole land. It is a wide 
plain lying between the hills that rise behind 
Salonika and those others which the Seres road 
has to cross on its way to the Struma. The road 
runs across this plain for a distance of several 
kilometers, and as one marches up the views to 
left and right — and especially to the right — are 
discouraging. All that one can see in summer is 

9i 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

the expanse of parched, unhappy ground sweeping 
away to the distant hills. There are no trees, nor 
is there any kind of shelter from the blazing heat 
of the sun. The ground bears a little wretched 
grass, and a great many thistles, and nothing else 
at all, unless one counts the myriad lizards as a 
kind of secondary crop. It is all as bleached and 
dry and desolate as the dust-deep road itself. There 
is water to be found at some little distance from 
the road, but it runs out of sight in a deep cleft 
in the earth; it cannot give even one gracious 
touch of green to break that searing monotony of 
light and quivering heat. 

I have never seen a stretch of land that insisted 
more furiously upon being a desert. How it is I 
cannot say, but in Egypt one does not get the same 
effect of desperate desolation. The enormous 
spaces of the sand are terrible, not horrible. They 
are barren with a calm and as it were eternal con- 
tent, and with majesty. But here is no majesty, 
only a mean and squalid futility. The sand has 
no choice but to be barren, but this land might be 
laughing with flowers and singing with the little 
whispering song of the wind among the corn. It 
is that perhaps which makes it horrible and a place 
of torment for the body and the soul. 

As this plain is horrible, so is its heat horrible. 
Again it is different from other heat. There is the 
scorching fury of the blast that drives and burns 

/ 



HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS 

across the sand, and there is the demoralizing, 
langorous heat that soaks into every fibre of the 
being in such a town as Alexandria, but the heat 
of Giivezne is not like either of these. There is 
something sullen and savage about it, something 
poisonous. It happened to me to camp on that plain 
* for two periods of a week and I would sooner 
have a month of the worst that the African desert 
can do than spend a third week there. It is better 
to be burnt up than stifled by foul, stale air from 
which all life-giving qualities have been drained 
away. 

We came to the place by night, had our meal, 
and slept for a few hours under the stars. We 
awoke very early with a distinct impression that 
all the flies of Macedonia had gathered round our 
camp to welcome us. By eight in the morning it 
was uncomfortably hot, accustomed though we 
were to the climate. Bivouacs were put up with- 
out delay, for it was obvious that shade would be 
badly needed soon, and no shade or shelter from 
the sun could we have unless we made it ourselves. 
Two hours later we were lying in those bivouacs 
wondering what we had done to deserve ii, and 
reflecting with uneasy minds that it was only ten 
o'clock. 

A bivouac can be quite a good shelter if it is 
fortified a little. If you can cut a lot of scrub and 
pile above it, and if you turn its mouth to the pre- 

93 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

vailing breeze — if any — your little canvas cave is 
at least tolerable during those hours when the heat 
compels people to remain still and under cover. 
But this wilderness had not even scrub to give us, 
and there was not even the faintest suggestion of a 
breeze. There was only the dead, unmoving air, 
and the sun which blazed through the thin canvas 
sheets with so little mitigation of his fury. We 
proceeded to spread blankets over the tops of our 
houses, and to wonder what more we could take 
off our bodies. But when your clothing consists 
of nothing but shirt, shorts, socks, puttees and 
boots, it is very difficult to know what you can 
remove without presenting large areas of your un- 
happy body to the exploring feet of the flies. 

For as our misery increased so did the swarms 
of insects grow happier. They liked the heat. 
They revelled in the foul, smothering air; the wil- 
derness was their chosen and beloved home, and 
they appreciated it thoroughly. Also they seemed 
to have an idea that we had come there on purpose 
to play with them and they meant to make the 
most of it. It is bad enough to be baked and 
smothered and poisoned, but when in addition you 
are invited to become the playmate of a few 
thousand flies, ants, spiders and grasshoppers, life 
seems rather too much of a burden. 

There may be other countries as densely popu- 
lated with insects as Macedonia, but it is a little 

94 



HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS 

hard to believe that there are. Certainly the flies 
are a far worse plague than they ever were in 
Egypt. Wherever we went they were swarming. 
If we camped on a spot where no troops had been 
before and thought that we had escaped them, they 
were round us in millions within twenty-four 
hours. This ground at Giivezne had been used for 
camping before, and they were all ready for us. 
If we never see any more flies for all the rest of 
our lives we, who spent those two weeks on the 
detestable plain, shall have seen our share. 

And the flies form only one of the tribes which 
infest the land. Everywhere the ground is alive 
with grasshoppers of all sorts and sizes which keep 
up a continual chirping all the day, to be succeeded 
by the tree-frogs which keep the night alive with 
sound. Also there are innumerable ants, and in 
many areas it does not seem possible to pitch a 
bivouac without having one or two of their holes 
within the boundaries of one's dwelling. Ants, 
however, do not give much trouble, and they are 
tidy little beasts. As you go on with the weary 
massacre of flies which is the chief business of the 
day, they wait on the floor to collect and carry 
off the dead bodies. They seem to find them 
useful. 

Then there are numerous spiders, including one 
most objectionable variety, a large and heavy 
creature with a weakness for walking across one's 

95 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

face in the middle of the night. It is not pleasant 
to wake up in the middle of that promenade; it 
is still less pleasant to wake and find that a mas- 
sive centipede three inches long is doing the same 
thing. Those centipedes are perhaps the most 
loathsome of all. They are so big, so fond of 
going to sleep in one's bed, and they look so 
venomous. Probably they are perfectly harmless, 
but one instinctively believes the worst of such 
creatures without waiting for investigations. Also 
one kills them at sight and that in itself is a hor- 
rible business. There is so much squelching as the 
boot does its work. 

When you get away from the insects the small 
live things of the land are rather entertaining. 
Lizards are everywherc > and they are lively, 
friendly little beasts. It is a pity that they feel so 
much like snakes in the dark, and newcomers are 
apt to be a little disturbed at first, but they soon 
get used to the small, bright-eyed animal that 
insists on a share of bivouac or hut. But of course 
the chief entertainer of the Salonika armies is the 
tortoise, the tortoise who stalks or occasionally 
gallops round the country, waving his head from 
side to side, inquiring into everything, carrying on 
all his most private affairs in the most shameless 
publicity, and upon occasion consenting to run 
races with others of his kind for the benefit of his 
owners and sundry amateur bookmakers. 

96 



HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS 

If you have only known the tortoise sleeping 
in a corner of a conservatory or sluggishly wander- 
ing round some suburban garden, you cannot im- 
agine how gay and alert a beast he can be. Also 
he is resourceful and given to helping his com- 
panions in distress. I went one day to my bivouac, 
tired with a long spell of road-making, and 
sprawled on the bed for a rest. Very much to my 
disgust I found a large, hard lump beneath me, and 
cursing my servant for spreading the bed on top 
of such a rock, I set to work to fish it out. It was 
not a stone at all, but a large and venerable tortoise 
who had burrowed under my blankets for a quiet 
nap. I did not appreciate his enterprise and I was 
annoyed, so I put him outside the door on his 
back, and a big tortoise on his back is one of 
the most helpless things in the world. I lay there, 
watching his frantic effprts to turn over, when 
suddenly another tortoise appeared. There was a 
little intelligent pushing and butting, and my cap- 
tive was right side up once more, and hurrying off 
with his recuer to a place of safety. 

You may be wondering why I should have begun 
this chapter with a large number of complaints 
about heat and a place called Guvezne, and then 
rambled off into a dissertation on tortoises. It is 
really quite simple, and the two things are not so 
far apart as they may seem to be. You see in 
those purgatorial days we had to get through the 

97 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

time somehow, and all these flying and crawling 
and creeping things helped us to do it. In a country 
so empty of occupation as Macedonia at noon, it 
is something to have even a tortoise to watch; 
there is a little distraction in waiting to see what 
will be the next move of the lizard which is peering 
so inquiringly into the entrance of the bivouac. 
So when one begins to think of those days of torrid 
unhappiness, one thinks also of all those little 
animals which were our companions at the time, 
either as unendurable plagues, or as centers of a 
little interest on which the mind might fix for a 
while and forget the slow passing of the hours. 

One thinks of them and of one thing beside — 
of thirst. There is the thirst which comes from 
marching or from long labor, but it is a sheer 
pleasure compared with that thirst that comes 
from lying still and being smothered by the life- 
less burning air. You can come in from your 
march, drink a pint of anything that may be avail- 
able, and get a space of sheer happiness and con- 
tent. But when you are just waiting for the 
smoldering hours to pass there does not seem to 
be anything at all that will relieve the parched 
throat, and the mouth is always dry. 

Besides, there is usually nothing to drink but 
water that is chlorinated and warm. To a genuine, 
toil-born thirst, that would seem good enough, 
but it is only an insult to the feverish craving that 

98 



HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS 

comes from lying still and being hot. It seems to 
cake on the mouth and throat, so that the misery 
after drinking it is greater than the misery which 
went before. One can only lie there and dream of 
real drinks, cold drinks, drinks with none of that 
filthy taste in them. 

The long day drags to its close, and with the 
evening comes the return of life. There is that 
much at least of gain in the business. When the 
sun is almost on the western hills one does taste 
something of the absolute joy of living. By the 
time tea is over — and scalding hot tea is a fine thing 
for that wretched thirst — the world appears to be 
a different place. That is the time when 
people who own guns go valiantly forth to 
look for hares, when one remembers letters that 
should be written, and has heart to discuss the 
chances of really finding the war at some time 
or other. It is possible then to take an interest 
in the prospect for dinner, and to go on excursions 
in search of eggs and tomatoes. The sunset is per- 
ceived to be glorious, and even the thistle-grown 
plain is not quite such a wilderness as formerly it 
had appeared to be. 

There is the comfortable assurance that life will 
be quite tolerable for a matter of fourteen hours, 
and that the flies will go to sleep. Of course they 
prefer to go to sleep inside the bivouac if they 
can, and if you let them do that they are quite sure 

99 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

to awaken you at sunrise. The best thing to do 
is to wait till they have settled down cosily for the 
night, so that most of the roof is black with them, 
and then get to work with, a towel and beat and 
drive them out. They always seem too sleepy to 
find their way back and then when you go to bed 
you can drape mosquito netting over the entrance, 
and there will be no trouble about sleeping in the 
morning till you are officially awakened to get 
through another day of sun and sorrow. 



TOO 



CHAPTER X 

SUNDAYS AT THE WAR 

WE left Guvezne and marched away up the 
Seres road to Lahana, which stands just 
below the highest point which the road reaches 
on its journey from Salonika to the Struma. What 
we did there is a question of no importance, but 
we took three weeks over doing it, and on the 
Sundays we used to go to the war, because Sunday 
was a holiday and we could do what we liked. It 
was possible to start quite early in the morning 
because we had left the padre with the rest of 
the battalion lower down the road, so there were 
no church parades to hinder us. The cook was 
inclined to be grieved because he had to get up at 
unconscionable hours to give us breakfast, but that 
could not be helped. We had to make the most of 
the holiday. 

It is quite easy to get to the war from Lahana. 
All that you have to do is to stop the first motor 
that comes along — so long as it is not a Red Cross 
car — and go as far as it will take you. If it is one 
of those modest, retiring motors that does not like 

101 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

to push itself forward too far, you can always 
jump off when it stops and board one which is 
going further. Those lorries have to go fairly 
close to the trouble. They have shells to take to 
the batteries, and food for the men in the front 
line. Of course they don't go up to the front line, 
but there are times when they find themselves 
under fire. At the period of which I am writing, 
the Bulgar was in the habit of dropping an occa- 
sional shell on the road. His attentions did not 
make the road much worse than it was before, but 
they served to put a spice of adventure into our 
journeying. 

The proper thing to do first of all was to go and 
call on a battery. There was always sure to be 
one about somewhere, if only you could find it. 
Locating batteries is not the easiest job in the 
world, even when they are on your own side and you 
are free to move where you will in search of them, 
and it is more difficult than usual in Macedonia be- 
cause the country is so very complex. But one 
learns in time to track the guns to their hiding 
place in some secret valley or other, and there 
they are, sending little messengers out across the 
river and the plain to some village which is 
suspected of concealing the enemy. 

There is at least one thing to be said in favor 
of our war in Macedonia — it is possible to look 
at it. There is no question of sitting dismally in 

102 



SUNDAYS AT THE WAR 

a trench and squinting round corners through a 
periscope. When you are up with a battery, you 
can generally watch the shells arrive at their jour- 
ney's end, which is much more satisfactory than 
being informed through a telephone that some in- 
visible target has been hit. It is possible to sit 
on a hill above the guns and see quite plainly what 
they are doing. You may watch a village being 
literally taken to pieces. 

It is all rather curious. One cannot feel much 
sympathy for the average Macedonian village. It 
does not look as if anybody loved it; if one had 
the dreadful misfortune to be born in such a place 
one would, I think, desire most urgently to forget 
the fact. But even so it is not possible to forget 
that it was once the habitation of men, and that 
children played round those ugly little houses be- 
fore war came and sent the bullock wagons creak- 
ing down the road. It all seems rather a pity. 
. . . But presently interest gets the better of 
emotion, and one watches with an increasing pride 
the careful, accurate work of the men at the guns, 
as bit by bit the village jumps into the air amid 
a cloud of dust and vanishes. How such accuracy 
is achieved one cannot tell, but there it is, and 
it is a fascinating thing to watch. 

Observed under those conditions, war becomes 
almost impersonal. Instead of being a thing of 
passion and emotion, it is a cold-blooded game of 

103 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

*** *"< ■!■ I II I III —TO 

skill, in which all the players, down to one's very 
self, are just pawns. Possibly the enemy is trying 
to find and silence the battery, and his exploring 
shells are bursting at varying distances around. It 
does not matter. There may be a consciousness 
that if one shell landed at one's feet the conse- 
quences would be disastrous, but then it seems — and 
is — so very unlikely that any shell would land 
in so inconvenient a spot, that the question of per- 
sonal peril simply does not arise. So, too, if the 
glasses show little figures flying from the village 
below, and some of them crumple up and fall — 
it does not feel as if the final catastrophe had 
overtaken some human beings; it is simply that 
some pawns have been removed from the board. 
It is all in the game, the fate of those little distant 
figures, the fate of the men one knows, one's own 
fate. Those shells bursting around do not stand 
for the menace of pain and death so much as for 
tokens of the enemy's failure to be as clever as 
our men. The gunner is more of a scientist than 
a warrior, and the emotions he gets out of war 
are not unlike those which you find in golf or 
cricket, or any game of skill. 

If you wish to get down to the stark realities 
of war, outpost and patrol work can be recom- 
mended. Charging trenches or other positions is 
all very well for war-frenzy, but the night work 
is the thing to drive home the sheer facts of con- 

104 



SUNDAYS AT THE WAR 

" ■ i ii 

flict and peril and the worth of individual supe- 
riority. Sometimes if you go down from the 
batteries to call on the men in the front line they 
will let you lend a hand if anything is going to 
happen. It is necessary of course, to be careful 
how you invite yourself, and to avoid attracting 
the attention of commanding officers and adjutants. 
It is not altogether that they want the whole affair 
to themselves. They are not so much greedy 
over the war, as concerned about what might 
happen to them if by chance you were killed while 
on their hands, and they were called upon to ex- 
plain why you were there. I am not aware of 
any regulation forbidding one to go and study the 
war at close quarters, but there are so many regu- 
lations in army life that one is always apt to think 
that anything out of the ordinary must be in diso- 
bedience of an order which one has for the moment 
forgotten. 

Going as a member of an outpost company 
in unfamiliar country at night is always a good 
adventure. The men fall in so quietly on the dim 
parade-ground, wherever and whatever it may be, 
and the business begins to be interesting at onCe. 
It grows still more interesting when, with only 
a whispered word of command they begin to move 
off and vanish, so that when your turn comes 
and you follow, it is only possible to see the few 
who are immediately in front of you, and all the 

™5 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

rest are folded away in the darkness. That is 
the time to test a man's power of marching at 
night. If the battalion is without experience of 
the game that progress will be slow, very uneasy, 
and very noisy. But the old hands go very softly 
and quickly onward. They avoid obstacles at 
whose existence they can scarcely guess; they 
choose the surest way by instinct, and never do 
they commit that major crime of showing them- 
selves on the skyline. 

Outpost work in Macedonia is so fascinating 
because the country varies so incessantly and so 
greatly. There is a different problem to solve 
every time. You have to choose the line which, in 
your opinion, can be held, and then you have to 
make your arrangements for holding it, and that 
in a country of innumerable hills and valleys. 
There come to the mind all sorts of crowding pictures. 
The golf enthusiast goes about the country planning 
imaginary links across each fresh landscape ; the soldier, 
if he is just an ordinary infantryman, is more 
likely to be arranging outpost schemes. And when 
it is night, and the tangle of hills is suggested 
rather than seen, and roving bands of the enemy 
may be anywhere in the darkness, the game be- 
comes really worth playing. Sitting now in quiet 
security and looking back, one sees how good a 
game it was. 

One night there was a sharp little rock strewn 

1 06 



SUNDAYS AT THE WAR 



hill to climb, and the ridge of it had to be crossed 
somehow. Luckily the ridge itself was covered 
with great boulders and we threaded and crawled 
through them till we were safely established on 
the far slope. Then, just as we were about to 
make our dispositions a messenger came back 
from the scouts who were pushing on ahead. A 
party of the enemy was crossing our front. There 
was a quick, whispered word, and our men sank 
out of sight among the rocks, and no sound gave 
warning of our presence. But very soon there 
were sounds which told of the coming of the others, 
and they came and passed, not twenty yards away. 
Their strength was about equal to our own, 
and, taking them by surprise, we should have had 
all the advantage, but it was not our business to 
advertise our presence, and so long as they did not 
turn towards our camp in the rear, they must go 
unharmed and in ignorance. In ignorance they 
went, turning back to their own place, and pres- 
ently the sound of their passing died away, and 
we could get on with our own work. 

Encounters of that kind have been frequent on 
the Struma front, and most men who have been 
down there for any length of time could tell of 
something of the sort happening to them when 
they have been out on patrol duty. Sometimes, 
of course, it is necessary or advisable to fight. 
(Rather I should say it is permissible. There is 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

no waiting for necessity, and the patrol commander 
who, acting on strict orders, forbids an encounter 
is rather more unhappy than the men under him.) 
Those are the occasions when the bayonet does 
some of its deadliest work. Shooting is usually 
to be avoided, since it gives away so much in- 
formation and wakes up the artillery, so there is 
the fierce, quiet struggle in the dark, till the sur- 
vivors of one side or the other realize that there 
is nothing for it but to slip away among the 
shadows. 

In these affairs, as in all the operations of war, 
the tricks of chance are unaccountable. One man 
I knew had a piece of bad luck quite equal to that 
of the man who got a bullet through his body 
while he was sitting at tea. This other had been out 
with a patrol. They had had a highly successful trip 
and were returning unharmed and jubilant. They 
were close to our lines when some distant Bulgar 
loosed off another of those random shots at the 
sky. In its downward flight the bullet took my 
friend's right eye out almost as neatly as a sur- 
geon could have done. He felt, so he says, very 
little pain either at the time or at any time after- 
wards, but his disgust was tragic. Later on I 
found him, still fuming, in a hospital in Salonika, 
roaming round the wards in pajamas and a dressing 
gown, because he had nothing else to wear. His 
kit had vanished. When he was hit he had only 

108 



SUNDAYS AT THE WAR 

been wearing a shirt and shorts, and he had been 
waiting for some clothes for a fortnight, waiting 
for them to come so that he might sail for home. 
He seemed to consider that luck had deserted him 
completely. 

But on the whole the Struma valley would be 
quite a happy place if it were not for the mosqui- 
toes. The trouble about Macedonia is that you 
have so many things to fight. There is the land- 
scape to be conquered, and the water to be kept 
in order, and malaria to be opposed, and all these 
things must be done before you can pay any sen- 
out attention to the Hun and his companions. So 
on the Struma the real weapons are mosquito nets 
and quinine, and the real enemy is that deplorable 
insect which sits on the side of the bivouac hang- 
ing its head so sheepishly in the morning when it 
has spent all the night in taking blood out of one's 
body and putting poison in. 

In spite of mosquitoes, however, we always 
looked forward to those Sundays. It is true that 
the work we were doing was important and even 
necessary, but it was very dull, and it was not a 
bit like war. 



iop 



CHAPTER XI 

PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 

PLAYTIME is really a serious problem in 
Macedonia. While we remained at Lahana 
and could have those Sunday excursions we were 
quite happy, but there were only three such Sun- 
days, and then we returned to the old, familiar 
condition of having plenty of time to spare and 
absolutely nothing to do with it. I should think 
there never was a country so empty of the means 
of entertainment. Since our transport usually 
consisted of pack mules, we could carry nothing 
with us that was not absolutely essential. The 
weight of our kit was constantly being checked, 
and if it exceeded the standard of the moment 
something had to be left behind, and our track was 
marked by abandoned articles of clothing and other 
personal tackle. Under those conditions the 
utmost that one could carry in the way of appar- 
atus for recreation was a pack of cards, and curi- 
ously, few of us had packs of cards to carry. 
Even if we had them, they were hardly ever used. 
During the whole of the time I was in the country 

no 



PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 

I only played bridge twice, till I went into hospital. 
It did not seem to occur to us to play games. 

There were no collective amusements at all. It 
is possible that there were in the land battalions 
who possessed concert parties of their own and had 
regular entertainments, but I did not come in con- 
tact with them. It is a little difficult to have con- 
certs without a piano, and the army is not encour- 
aged to carry pianos about Macedonia. There was 
one in the Y.M.C.A. tent in the old base camp at 
Karaissi, but I did not see another until I was on 
the boat which took me away, nor did I see another 
of the tents of the Y.M.C.A. Very likely there are 
units which excel in camp-fire concerts, but we had 
no gifts in that direction. It did not occur to us to 
sing, just as it did not occur to us to play cards, or, 
indeed, any other games. I suppose we might have 
played football if we had owned a ball, but we had 
nothing of the sort, and no one felt the lack of it 
badly enough to send for one. The various units 
stationed in and about Salonika used to play match- 
es at times, but we up-country people had nothing 
to do with those festivities, nor any chance to take 
part in them. 

Some units took more pains to amuse themselves 
than we did. I have heard of at least one battery of 
the artillery which owned a gramophone and took 
it all round the country, but of course in the artil- 
lery there is a chance to carry such things. And 

in 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

one day, upon those hills north-east of Ambarkoj, 
I discovered evidence that at least one member of 
the Salonika armies had a desire for collective 
amusements, for the wind brought to me across the 
tangle of the evergreen oak a sheet of paper which 
I found to be a copy of a seventeenth-century mad- 
rigal. It seemed a curious thing to find there, on 
those lonely, distant hills, so far from all those 
choral societies and glee clubs and the like with 
which we noise-making people delight ourselves. 
It is not possible to understand why a man should 
have brought such a thing so far unless he had with 
him companions who would help to sing it, and one 
imagines that there is, somewhere in Macedonia, a 
battalion accustomed to music. It would have been 
a happy thing to have found that cheerful camp, but 
all the country round was bare of troops, and the 
madrigal itself was so weather-worn that it must 
have been blowing to and fro on those hills for a 
long time. I put it in my pocket and I have it still, 
a curious relic of the army and of the country 
where for so long our men have had to face the dif- 
ficult task of keeping out of mischief. 

For of course the natural thing to do if you have 
time to spare and no occupation is to get into mis- 
chief, and if we had been living under those condi- 
tions in any ordinary country it is possible that 
there would have been a great deal of trouble. 
But the country is so far from ordinary that there 

112 



PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 



was very little trouble indeed. There were of 
course shops in the villages where liquids preju- 
dicial to discipline could be obtained. On the 
counter of nearly every Macedonian shop you will 
find three bottles containing Vin Samos, mastic, 
and cognac, and it did happen from time to time 
that some unlucky private would be taken with a 
terrible thirst, contrive to get past the military 
police into the nearest village, and proceed to 
empty bottles of cognac. Then he would return to 
the camp in a condition of valiant frenzy which 
would lead him to the guard-room and first-hand 
knowledge of Field Punishment No. 1. But such 
incidents were very rare. Most of the villages are 
so small that it is quite easy to keep the thirsty 
souls out of them, and our men behaved wonder- 
fully well. 

Their conduct was the more creditable because 
it frequently happened that for weeks at a time it 
was impossible to organize anything in the shape 
of a canteen. When the camp was pitched away 
among the hills where neither beer nor any other 
stores could be obtained, the canteen ceased to 
exist until we moved to some happier spot, where 
day by day the little bullock carts would come 
rumbling and creaking with the barrels, and there 
would be tinned fruit, sardines, cigarettes and 
other luxuries on sale, and time would not hang 
quite so heavily on their hands. 

ii3 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

But even when the canteen was in working 
order it could not occupy more than a little of the 
spare time, and it was always rather hard to dis- 
cover just what the men did with themselves. Of 
course most of the leisure hours in the hot weather 
came in the middle of the day when the heat is too 
great for any kind of exertion. During those hours 
they would lie in their bivouacs, and sleep or talk. 
They were great talkers, those lads of ours, and 
they would go on, hour after hour. What they 
found to talk about I cannot say, but it is the same 
all through the army; and you will never find a 
camp that is not humming with talk through every 
idle hour. 

So they would talk, and attend to their clothes 
and kit, and do their washing. There are no laun- 
dries in Macedonia, and the ladies of the land have 
not realized that they could make a very good 
living by taking in washing. Their general ap- 
pearance forces one to the conclusion that they 
are unaccustomed to the idea of washing their own 
clothes, so probably they would be intensely aston- 
ished if they realized we should be quite prepared 
to pay them to wash our things. But if he can- 
not find any one to do it for him, the soldier is 
thoroughly capable of doing his own washing, and 
usually he does it very well. Disdaining the slip- 
shod habit of using cold water, you may see them 
building tiny fires and boiling the water in their 

114 



PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 

mess tins, and soaping and scrubbing the clothes 
with skilful energy. One of our men actually- 
owned a little flat-iron, and it was as hard-working 
a piece of metal as I have ever known. It was 
constantly being borrowed by the dandies, who 
sought to increase the beauty of their shirts or 
to give a finer finish to their socks. And I know 
that my washing was done as I have rarely had 
it done by any laundry at home. The soldier has 
the trick of doing thoroughly all the infinitely 
varied jobs which he may have to undertake. 

It is possible that many men will bring back 
hobbies from Salonika. It was quite interesting 
to notice on hospital ships and in hospitals on the 
way home how many owned those little pocket 
chess boards and sets of pieces which can be folded 
into the shape and size of a note case. Then there 
were others who had taken up sketching, and some 
who had carried round little volumes of poetry 
and read them till they knew every line by heart. 
There is, of course, nothing to read in the up- 
country camps except the Balkan News, and such 
books and papers as may be sent from home. There 
can be no camp libraries, nor are there any of 
those distributions of papers and magazines which 
brighten the life of our men in France. In conse- 
quence everyone reads everything that comes from 
cover to cover, and advertisements get an amount of 
attention which would make the fortune of the 

115 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

advertisers if only their shops were not so far 
away. Papers and magazines and books are passed 
from hand to hand while they will hold together, 
and nobody minds what he gets hold of so long 
as it is some print which he can read. If you 
see, as I have seen, an entirely illiterate Irishman 
poring over the Saturday Review it does not mean 
that ours is the most intellectual army the world 
has ever known. It only means that he is very 
bored with the cycle of his thoughts and that 
printed words, incomprehensible though they may 
be, are giving him a little blessed relief. I have 
known what it is to be profoundly charmed and 
affected by the information, gleaned from the 
columns of a local weekly, that Mrs. Smith of 
Smith Villa, requires a house-parlormaid, that 
there are three in the family, that two other 
servants are kept, that the wages offered are £18, 
and that an abstainer is desired. If I had not 
been soaking up those details I might have been 
listening to some one who would say, "But the 
A.S.C. say that if we do advance they can't feed 
us. . . ." 

Everybody knows that people whose working 
hours are full of the most violent physical exer- 
tions do quite commonly seek more exertions when 
playtime comes, and so it was with us. Every now 
and then the entire camp would seem to be taken 
with a mania for hurling large stones about. You 

116 



PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 

would see men standing in rows and throwing 
great pieces of rock in the fashion laid down for 
the throwing of bombs, and they might keep it 
up for half an hour in a valiant contest. Our bomb- 
ing expert was usually in the thick of these out- 
bursts of energy, improving the occasion with a 
few words of advice. He was one of those en- 
thusiasts who believe utterly that the war can only 
be won with the aid of their own special line, and 
nothing would have pleased him more than to have 
had a whole battalion of bombers. 

One other amusement we had which called for 
plenty of exertion, and was occasionally profitable 
to the mess. We used to get our revolvers and go 
out looking for hares. Macedonia is simply alive 
with game in certain areas. It seems impossible 
to walk a couple of hundred yards without putting 
up a covey of partridges or a great, galloping hare. 
To go hunting hares with a revolver is quite amus- 
ing, though of course it is not regarded with favor 
by those aristocrats who have shot guns and treat 
themselves seriously as purveyors of game. But 
if you have no gun, and are very weary of seeing 
large quantities of desirable food escaping from 
you it is soothing to take your Webley for a walk 
round the hills. Of course it is more a matter of 
luck than anything else. A service revolver is a 
wonderful weapon with a great range, but it takes 
a crack shot to put a bullet into a retreating hare, 

117 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

and so to hit it, moreover, that the animal shall 
not be reduced to a shapeless mash of fur and flesh 
and splinters of bone. But if by some fluke the 
bullet just chips the head, the prospect for to- 
morrow's dinner is suddenly and wonderfully im- 
proved, and there is ample recompense for three 
hours of scrambling over rocks and through thick- 
ets of brambles. 

The evening was the time when we went on 
those excursions, and the evenings of Macedonia 
do very much to atone for the rest of the day. And 
it was good to come back to the camp, and to sit 
on a bank outside the bivouac watching the pageant 
of the west, listening to the guns as they grew 
busy with the evening performance. That was 
the time when the mess president would send for 
the jealously guarded bottles and we would sit 
through that half-hour before dinner, quite cheer- 
fully discussing the things we had discussed half a 
hundred times already, having recovered from the 
weariness and irritation of the day, being at peace 
with the world. 

That was, perhaps, our only real recreation, the 
only game we played consistently — just that game 
of sitting and talking in the delicate evening air 
when all the work was done and our bodies were 
tired enough to get the full flavor of enjoyment out 
of rest. Probably they were very monotonous con- 
versations, but indeed they do not seem so in 

118 



PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA 

retrospect. The memory of those hours is very- 
pleasant. And there was always something to 
watch, if it was only the shifting of color on land 
and sky or the slow departure of the light. 

We learned that it is not necessary to be amused. 
I fancy that many of those who return will find 
that a gulf has established itself between them and 
the friends who have remained at home. When at 
last I was set free to be with my own people for 
a little while it was with an actual sense of sur- 
prise that I realized that it was considered usual 
to go out in the evening to theaters and music 
halls and concerts, to dine at restaurants, to play 
games, and generally to avail one's self of the 
elaborate machinery of entertainment. That ma- 
chinery seemed to have lost all purpose and value. 
It did not appear that there was anything of worth 
in the activities of the professional entertainers; it 
seemed so much better to sit still, to talk a little 
from time to time, to revel in that little space of 
rest and dear companionship. 

I suppose there is something which tends to 
simplicity in such a life as that which we were 
leading — a simplicity which is not of the surface, 
but deeper. We did not acquire scorn of pleasant 
food, of good clothes and comfortable beds, but 
our minds, unwearied by the complexities of mod- 
ern civilization, did not require such labored amuse- 
ment. They were content with a little dreaming 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



as the flames of the camp fires went stabbing up- 
wards; for long enough to come we shall find a 
sufficient splendor in sitting at the close of day 
by our own hearths swathed in the secure com- 
forts of peace. 



120 



CHAPTER XII 

HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

TO us at Lahana there came orders to pack up 
our traps and depart in haste to a place called 
Janes, on the other side of the country. It may be 
as well to remark that it is not customary to pro- 
nounce this name as if it was the plural of Jane. 
It is more usual to make the sound Yanesh, with 
the accent on the -esh. The letter j in Macedonian 
names has the force and qualities of y, and if this 
is remembered there will be no difficulty with 
them. It is true that even so the pronunciation 
will not be exactly that of the people who live in 
the villages, but no arrangement of letters would 
do justice to the noises they produce, and they 
always understand when we speak the names in 
our own fashion. 

So much for the name. Janes, as the map will 
show, is a place which lies behind the Doiran front. 
It was the pleasure of the authorities to send us 
from time to time to sit down behind different 
portions of the front, to listen to other people 
busy with the war. We never knew why we were 

121 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



sent. It did not appear that anybody ever wanted 
us, nor did anybody seem glad to see us. But 
it was an order, so we tramped to and fro across 
the country, gaining much knowledge of hill and 
valley and mountain track, and hoping eternally 
that at the end of each journey we should really 
find the war. There is something very cheering 
about the tidings that the battalion is ordered to 
make haste to a distant place. It sounds as if 
something is really going to happen at last, and 
that thought is enough to banish all weariness. 
In this instance the orders came at eight in the 
evening after a hard day's work, and it was stated 
that we were to be ready to march out at ten. 
Nothing but the prospect of a fight at the end of 
the journey could make troops cheerful under such 
conditions. To be told to pull down your house 
and pack it up just when you are thinking of crawl- 
ing indoors and going to sleep is depressing. 

But rumors help one round some awkward corn- 
ers in the army. Within an hour the camp had 
been swept away and folded up. Down in the 
transport lines mules were entering their usual 
protests against pack saddles, and little groups 
of officers were poring over maps by the light of 
the dancing flames of candles. We knew those 
maps by heart, but we could never resist the temp- 
tation to stare at them on such occasions. It was 
as though we hoped to discover something that 

122 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

would improve our chances of getting into the fir- 
ing line, as though they held the secret of our 
fate concealed among their innumerable contours. 
And as we traced the way we talked, eagerly and 
happily, and for a long time no one thought to 
quote that classic saying of the A.S.C. which had 
killed so many of our dreams. 

So it came to be ten o'clock, and under the 
light of the stars we scrambled across a mile of 
furiously broken country to our old friend the 
Seres road. The length of time which a battalion 
requires to get under way at night depends very 
exactly on its experience. If it is a new, half- 
trained unit there are delays which spoil tempers, 
and the adjutant rides up and down the line with 
fury increasing in his heart. But there are no such 
troubles when you have old hands to deal with. 
Everything slips into its place swiftly and easily. 
The transport does not go wandering off across 
country in the opposite direction, and the ammuni- 
tion mules are ready behind their companies. Far 
away in England we had objected to night opera- 
tions, but in Macedonia we realized what we 
gained through having been trained and drilled 
in the dark. In a very little while we were moving 
off down the road. 

Somewhere between Likovan and Guvezne — its 
exact position is a matter of no importance — there 
exists a rest camp, established for the use of 

123 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

troops whose business it is to move on the road. 
Why it was pitched in the particular position which 
it occupies I do not know; it is possible that no- 
body knows. To be sure there is a convenient 
water supply, but there is nothing else to recom- 
mend it. It is arranged on a series of sharp little 
ridges, with deep ditches and gullies crossing it 
in all directions. When the marching men come 
to the gate of it they are met by others bearing 
lanterns who proceed to conduct them through the 
perilous gloom. In most places it is necessary to 
go in single file, and for a battalion to pass a point 
in that fashion takes some time. More of the lan- 
tern-bearers take charge of the transport, and lead 
it off to another place, so that you are effectually 
divorced from your kit and stores. The ground 
reserved for officers appears, in the darkness, to 
be so cleverly fortified by ditches that no one 
could possibly reach it unless he had spent his life 
in studying the arrangements. By the time you 
get to that high bank, and see below you the little 
lights which mark the lines where the men are 
resting, and a dim, distant confusion which con- 
ceals the transport and all your blankets, you are 
apt to be out of love with Macedonia. 

It was my fate to come twice to that camp, each 
time on a dark night. In the morning it looks 
rather pretty and there is a good view, but nothing 
can persuade me that it is a nice camp, or that 

124 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

the man who chose such a position for it has a 
kind heart. On this occasion we reached it be- 
tween one and two in the morning, and the fact 
that we had been there before did not make things 
any easier for us. It was nearly an hour and a 
half before the tangle was straightened out and 
the blankets appeared, so that we could roll our- 
selves up and sleep for a brief two hours. We 
left the place soon after five, and marched off 
down the road once more, on the second stage of 
our journey. 

If you look at a small map of Macedonia you 
may wonder why we were going down the Seres 
road to get from Lahana to Janes. It will seem 
that the more direct way would have been across 
country by Rahmanli and Kukus, but if you study 
a really large map you will see why we had to 
work back towards Salonika first. Lahana stands 
on its hill-top in the heart of a great tangle of 
hills. To travel direct from there to Kukus would 
mean an endless swarming up high places, an end- 
less scrambling down into sudden valleys. A very 
few strong and well-practised men might make 
the journey in the time we took over the detour, 
but it would be impossible for a battalion with its 
transport to travel that way without the most 
serious loss of time. The Seres road is indescrib- 
ably bad, but it is the only way across those hills 
which is in the least practicable. There is no other 

1*5 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

g i [ i » ■ i i i 

way of getting to Lahana which an army could 
use. Five miles away on either side of the road 
you might dwell remote and inaccesible, untroubled 
by the motions of the world. 

The hills run up from a point just north of 
Salonika in a fairly well denned range which parts 
the valley of the Galika and the plain to the west 
of it from the valley of the Kurudere and the plain 
which holds Giivezne. To the north of Ambarkoj 
the hills spread out fanwise, and go piling up in 
heaped confusion all the way to the Struma valley. 
The only way of getting from the Struma to the 
Doiran front is to travel down almost to Giivezne 
and then to strike westwards and across the hills 
at Ambarkoj by way of Salihli. That route is prac- 
ticable in summer, if you have nothing very heavy 
to drag with you, but in all rainy weather it is 
quite impossible, for then the dry beds of streams 
become fierce torrents with power to sweep a 
man's feet from under him. Either you must make 
bridges, or you must go round by some other 
way where bridges are already in existence. 

But though summer had passed into autumn the 
rains had not yet come, so we went to Giivezne, 
rested there on that unhappy plain through the 
heat of the day, and turned our faces to the west 
in the evening. Being as it is the gate between 
the two fronts with which our men are concerned, 
I suppose nearly every unit in the Salonika force 

126 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

has passed that way at one time or another, and 
has known the relief of climbing from the plain 
where the flies make a constant cloud about man 
and beast to the hills where they drop away and 
leave one in peace. Certainly the people of Salihli 
are quite accustomed to the passing of the army, 
and they have learnt more of our ways and desires 
than most of the villagers ever trouble to learn. 
Directly the column appears in sight there is a 
mighty searching and ransacking of all the places 
where the fowls do commonly lay the eggs, and 
then the population lines up by the roadside ready 
to do business. The Macedonian egg is not cheap. 
Almost everywhere a drachma — which is tenpence 
— is charged for four, but eggs are much to be 
desired, and though some may object, every one 
pays. The right thing to do when you are entering 
Salihli is to work towards the head of the column 
and do your shopping before the others come up, 
or all the eggs will be sold, and the natives will 
only have tomatoes and woolly-hearted melons to 
offer. 

We reached our camping ground above Am- 
barkoj at eight in the evening, having covered 
twenty-four miles in twenty-two hours. That 
would be little enough in a civilized country, but 
in Macedonia it is rather more than it sounds, and 
we were weary people. But, high on those hills, 
there was enough light remaining for the arrange- 

I2 7 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

ments for the night to be made properly, and for 
the cooking to be done. There was a comfortable 
meal for everyone, and when it waskpver we sat, 
very many of us, looking towards the hills which 
fence Lake Dorian, watching for the flash of the 
bursting shells, full of the contented weariness 
which is the great reward of such campaigning as 
ours. We slept late the next morning. Our orders 
were to reach Janes in the evening, and it did not 
seem necessary to arrive earlier. We breakfasted 
at ease between nine and ten, and proceeded to 
pack once more, taking our time about it, refusing 
to be disturbed. We moved out of the camp in 
leisurely fashion at 1 p.m., breaking for the first 
time that rule which forbids marching in the middle 
of the day. We were whole-hearted admirers of 
the rule by the time we had finished the journey. 
Every soldier can remember one march which 
stands out as the worst of all his experience. Usu- 
ally it occurs in the course of his training, while 
he is being broken to the burden of his new life, 
but it does occasionally, through force of circum- 
stances or by reason of the malice of the enemy, 
come later. That march from Ambarkoj to Janes 
was the most abominable I have ever known, and I 
suppose if I live to be an old man with lots of 
small people round me who want to know what. 
I did in the great war, I shall bore them to death 
with accounts of it. 

12S 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

The personal side of the matter is utterly unim- 
portant, but that small experience does stand as 
a very fair specimen of the kind of thing our men 
have had to put up with in Macedonia. Many 
people seem to imagine that our life in that irri- 
tating land has been one long picnic, remote from 
the perils of war. It is not, however, our fault or 
our choice that we had so little actual fighting, 
and the only sort of picnic which our experiences 
could be said to resemble would be one in which 
the picnic basket had been left behind and half of 
the party were more or less ill all the time. So 
far I have said little about malaria, the greatest 
of our foes in Macedonia. It will be necessary 
to say something about it later on, but for the 
present it is enough to record the fact that a touch 
of the fever came upon me just as that march was 
beginning, and remained with me for four out of 
the five hours which the journey occupied. Add 
to this the facts that through some misunderstand- 
ing about the water supply, hardly anyone had a 
drop of water in his bottle, that the sun was blaz- 
ing over head, and that our way was deep in dust 
where it did not lie among scorched, ensnaring 
herbage, and you will realize that the conditions 
were not the most favorable that could be im- 
agined. 

But our men have had to march under those con- 
ditions very many times. They have had to endure 

I2p 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

the heat and the dust and the maddening thirst of 
their fever-shaken bodies, and all that hideous tor- 
ment of the brain which at such hours can find 
no rest in even the dearest and most sacred of 
memories, but sees them as things distorted and 
terrible. At such a time one can only keep up- 
right while moving. At every halt it is necessary 
to lie down quickly, till the moment comes to move 
forward again. To sit on a horse would be im- 
possible ; there is nothing to do but to go stagger- 
ing on. There are visions of all cool springs and 
clear, cold water which come to cheat and baffle 
and mock, together with recollections of all the 
delectable drinks in the world. At one time I was 
dreaming of the drink called John Collins which 
they compound so admirably in the Khedival Club 
in Alexandria; at another there was the memory 
of the lager beer which comes to one in tall glasses 
at the Cafe Royal; again it was a vision of an inn 
I know in Derbyshire where the good beer is 
brought in great earthenware mugs. And all the 
time there were some words from the Mass run- 
ning a hopeless, meaningless race through my 
useless brain — qui nos prcecesserunt cum signo fidei 
et dormiunt in somno pads. It was a thoroughly un- 
pleasant business, and I could not for the life of me 
understand why the Romans found it necessary to 
have two words for "sleep." 

I want to insist that I am not writing of this 

/jo 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 



experience as a hardship which I suffered alone. I 
have no hard case to present for sympathetic atten- 
tion. Hundreds and thousands of our men have 
endured as much and more in that country, and for 
that reason only the thing is mentioned. Their 
suffering, their misery, must be set down to the 
account of the Salonika force as surely as the 
agony of the wounded is credited to the account ot 
our troops in France. We were bitten by mos- 
quitoes instead of being shattered by bullets, but* 
the result was not different in the end, and one 
can do no more than go on suffering up to that 
point where Nature sends the saving gift of un- 
consciousness; there is that limit fixed to all that 
a man can endure, and it has been reached not 
once but very many times by those who have 
played their part in the war by marching up and 
down and across Macedonia. And there are graves 
in that remote, inhospitable land. 

These things must be written if justice is to be 
done. There is a great tendency to regard the 
wounded man as being on a far higher plane than 
the man who merely contracted sickness in the 
service of his country. The wounded man is given 
gold stripes to wear. If he is an officer he is 
presented with a large sum of money as a wound 
gratuity — but there is nothing for the man who has 
merely fallen ill. He may be one of those who 
came away from Gallipoli with their constitutions 



131 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



shattered beyond hope of repair by dysentery; he 
may be tortured and twisted and crippled with 
rheumatism from the trenches in France; he may 
be so poisoned by malaria in Mesopotamia or Mace- 
donia, that the trouble will remain with him while 
life lasts, but in any event there is nothing for him. 
He has no gold stripes or gratuities, nor is it 
likely that his pension will reflect what he endured. 
In hospitals, in convalescent camps, and even at 
home in England, he is given to understand that 
he is a bit of a failure — a "wash-out" in the slang 
of the day — and not to be compared with some 
lucky youngster who has had a finger shot off or 
a tibia fractured. 

I want to suggest that this is damnably unfair, 
and I can do it the more freely because in my own 
case the damage is unimportant. The fact that I 
shall be liable for years to attacks of malaria will 
not affect my power to earn my own living after 
the war, so I am free to speak. And I want to 
suggest and to say as loudly as possible that the 
men who have been made ill in the service of 
their country do deserve every whit as much con- 
sideration as those who have been wounded. Their 
bodies are frequently damaged to a far greater 
and more permanent degree; the damage was in- 
curred in exactly the same service. 

No one who has belonged to the Salonika forces 
can avoid feeling strongly on this point. Every 



HOW WE WENT TO JANES 

soldier who is invalided home is an object of inter- 
est, at first. "Hullo, where were you hit?" is the 
unvarying question. There comes the reply, "I 
wasn't hit. I was at Salonika." There follows the 
unfailing comment — "Oh, I thought you were 
wounded." And that kind of thing is irritating to 
a man who knows that every few months for the 
rest of his life there will come a time when he 
will wish with all his heart that he had lost a leg 
or an arm or an eye rather than endure the misery 
which is his portion. 

Having said these things I may perhaps record 
the fact that after four hours that particular at- 
tack of fever passed off, and I marched very happily 
into our camp at Janes, as anxious as anyone to 
know about our chances of reaching the war. 
There came to us a lost, disconsolate staff officer, 
who desired to know what we belonged to and 
why we had come. 

"I've heard nothing about you," he said when 
his questions had been answered. "I'd no idea you 
were coming, but I suppose it's all right. No, 
there's nothing for you to do up here. The usual 
strafe is going on at Doiran of course, but nothing 
to worry about, and you won't be wanted any- 
how. But we've got heaps of blackberries round 
here, and perhaps your chaps would like to make 
some jam." 

It was Macedonia and we were accustomed to 

!33 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

Macedonia, so we did not say anything. There 
are so many occasions in that country when speech 
would be utterly inadequate, and we had learned 
how to be silent. We had marched to the place 
in haste, but we were not wanted. Up there by 
Doiran a few little miles away the guns were 
thundering, but we were not required. The war 
had done without us for so long, and it was still 
able to worry along without us. In the meantime 
there were blackberries, and we had permission 
and encouragement to make jam. 

You may find it hard to believe, but it is written 
in the history of the regiment that we settled down 
in that camp and proceeded to make jam. 



W 



CHAPTER XIII 

CONCERNING SPIES 

TWO or three days after we had settled down 
at Janes, a Hun came over to see what he 
could do for us. There were some anti-aircraft 
guns between us and the frontier, about three miles 
from our camp, and they did their best to argue 
with him. For a full five minutes we were admir- 
ing a pretty arrangement of smoke-balls which 
fluffed out of nothing in positions all round the 
tiny speck of the aeroplane, but he was a wise 
Hun, and he traveled high overhead and came sail- 
ing on, beyond the reach of the unpleasant splinters 
which our friends tried to scatter in his way. He 
came on and on, and at last he was circling very 
happily over our camp. If he had not been so 
wise, he would probably have come down a few 
thousand feet to make sure of his aim, taking his 
chance of what our rifles might do. As it was he 
dropped his bombs from something over ten thou- 
sand feet, and we had only a horse and a mule to 
put in the casualty list. But his coming left us full 
of solemn thoughts about the local Macedonians. 

135 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

Every average inhabitant of Macedonia is so 
curiously inaccessible. He lives in his terrible little 
villages, and seems to watch our progress with 
sullen, incurious eyes. He may stand upright for 
a time to watch the passing of our men, but soon 
he bends once more to his toil as though the matter 
did not concern him. If he keeps a shop he will 
sometimes condescend to sell his goods, in the 
same sullen fashion. He takes refuge all the time 
behind the barrier of his uncouth language. 

The army has the gift of tongues in no small 
measure. I have seen new drafts come out to 
Egypt, and I have heard them a fortnight later with 
all sorts of Arab slang at the tips of their tongues. 
Our men bring back words in many dialects from 
India, and the South African war made some en- 
during additions to our vocabulary. But there is 
another tale to tell in Macedonia. Why it should 
be I cannot imagine, but no one seems to pick up 
the language. At the end of my own time I only 
knew three words. I could make the noise which 
means eggs, and the other noise which means 
water, and one other which is a term — probably 
obscene — expressing hatred coupled with a burn- 
ing desire for the person addressed to depart at 
once. We had a few men, born traders, who were 
sent regularly into the villages to buy eggs and fowls 
and fruit, but I could never find that they had 
learnt much of the language. They seemed to con- 

& 



CONCERNING SPIES 



duct their business entirely by signs, and I found 
myself that the only way to go shopping in Mace- 
donia was to walk behind the counter, open all the 
drawers and cupboards and inspect the stock for 
myself, and then strike a bargain by signs. The 
language is, I suppose, a more or less debased form 
of modern Greek, but in many of the villages there 
is so strong a Turkish element that Arabic terms 
are frequently understood. 

But whatever he may understand of an alien 
tongue, the Macedonian makes no sign. He re- 
mains silent and inscrutable. We are in his coun- 
try — well, that is our affair. It is nothing to do 
with him and he will have nothing to do with us, 
unless we damage his crops. Then he will come 
demanding compensation, if he has no woman to 
send to speak for him. Of course a certain number 
of the men of the country have been enrolled in 
labor battalions or hired to act as muleteers, but 
the people of the up-country villages remain un- 
touched, to outward seeming, by all the raging of 
war. They see our columns moving to and fro, 
and go on their own way unheeding. We send our 
fine new roads sweeping past their villages, but 
they cling to their time-worn tracks and pass with 
averted heads. They are not even sufficiently in- 
terested to seek to make money out of us by cater- 
ing for our wants. 

So it might seem that these people were de- 



137 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

g—— ■— —^—m i— imiiiMiMM li ii ii Minimum —— mm in miiiwi mil I I 

tcrmined to ignore our presence in the land, and 
to treat us as if we did not exist — it might seem 
like that to anyone who did not know the facts, 
who had forgotten how the Hun set himself to 
permeate, that he might eventually dominate, all 
the Balkans. The German was in the land before 
us, and his agents remain to bear witness of him. 
Other maps are being made in these days, but for 
long enough our armies in Salonika could find none 
but German maps of the land — wonderful maps, 
crowded with a wealth of laborious detail which 
could not smother blazing inaccuracies. The Ger- 
man influence which has made Greece so bother- 
some is living still in all sorts of little villages 
of the plains and hills of Macedonia. Many of 
those sullen, silent peasants have excellent reasons 
for serving the German interest — reasons which 
take form and substance in tangible rewards. They 
learned the lesson before ever the war began to 
trouble Europe, and they have not forgotten. Be- 
cause they have not forgotten that Hun came over 
to drop his bombs into our camp at Janes. 

A camp which is composed of bivouacs is not a 
conspicuous object. It nestles down so close to 
the ground, and there is nothing in its coloring to 
catch the eye. Tents, even when they have been 
darkened and adorned with smudges of brown and 
yellow and green have their distinct and defiant 
shape and are hard to miss. But bivouacs are 

*£ 



CONCERNING SPIES 



hard to detect from a distance, and a high-flying 
airman would need to search very carefully before 
he found the camp. To make sure that our camps 
shall not be missed, and to guide his friends on 
the other side of the frontier, the innocent Mace- 
donian strolls out of his village, makes his observa- 
tions, chooses a spot which fulfils his requirements, 
and starts a prairie fire. He works on a system 
which is thoroughly understood by those whom he 
seeks to assist, and in a little while the aeroplanes 
are coming over to investigate and perhaps to take 
action. 

So it is that if a fire starts anywhere in the 
neighborhood of a camp, or along the line of march, 
the first thing to do is to look for somebody to 
hang. It might be an accident, of course, but such 
accidents are not usual, and it is better to make 
sure. Following upon the visit which we received, 
a small party went out to pay son e calls in the 
district, traveling in a motor borrowed for the 
occasion, and with carefully loaded revolvers. 
Attached to the party was a Macedonian who could 
speak quite twenty words of English, and claimed 
to be a follower of M. Venezelos, and our devoted 
friend. In addition he declared that he had per- 
sonal knowledge of all the people of all the vil- 
lages for miles around and knew the records of 
all the bad characters. There was, he said, a spy 
hiding in one of the villages, a man for whom 



139 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

the authorities in Salonika were searching. This 
man we must capture, and all would be well. 

Motoring in Macedonia is not a pastime for the 
idle rich. The way for that journey lay along the 
roughest of tracks, far from any of the roads which 
the army has made. It was a matter of bumping 
painfully from one village to the next, with occa- 
sional halts where the whole party had to turn 
out to help the car over some particularly vicious 
little gully. And at every village there was a 
weary round of apparently fruitless talk. First 
there was a search for the chief man of the place. 
Then when he was found, our Macedonian would 
lead him aside with an air of gravest importance. 
The talk would go on sometimes for as long as 
half an hour, and sitting in a car under the blister- 
ing sun amid the varied smells of a Macedonian 
village for half an hour is not pleasant. Mean- 
while the inhabitants would come out to stare at 
us with lowering faces. I remember one old wo- 
man. Not for a moment did she cease her business 
of threading tobacco leaves on a piece of string, 
but all the time she was glaring at us with the 
deadliest hate, the ugliest, bitterest fury seamed 
across her old, brown face. She might have been 
the mother of the man we sought. 

But always the report was that the elusive per- 
son had moved on to the next village, and to the 
next village we must go, bumping over some more 

140 



CONCERNING SPIES 



kilometers of those intolerable tracks, and at last 
we began to cherish hard thoughts about our gudie. 
He seemed to feel that there was trouble brewing, 
for suddenly he sprang up and pointed far out 
across the plain to where a man moved slowly 
behind a flock of goats. He was out of the car in 
a moment, and racing over the ground while we 
toiled behind him. He reached the shepherd long 
before we did, and when we arrived he turned to 
us with a glum face and an air of intense depres- 
sion. This, we gathered, was not our man after 
all. It was his brother, a good man, and a friend. 
The man whom we sought — he was far away. The 
good brother had not seen him for many weeks. 
All the foolish people who had been directing us 
had been helping us to find the good brother, and 
now there was nothing to be done. Everyone knew 
that this was a good man. 

There are some problems which are too hard 
even for the army, and plumbing the depths of Mace- 
donian character is one of them. Perhaps the man 
was lying all the time, but we had no evidence. 
We were quite helpless in his hands. The stolid 
shepherd did not seem to understand a word we 
said; he stood there behind the defences of his 
ignorance, and there was only the interpreter to 
whom we could speak. We went back to the car 
and bumped our way home to the camp, very thor- 
oughly defeated. 



141 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

It is not a good idea to go hunting for spies in 
Macedonia unless you have a number of special 
qualifications, chief of which are an intimate knowl- 
edge of the dialects of the district, and some experi- 
ence of the ways of the Eastern mind. Without 
these you will only meet with silence before which 
you are helpless. You may have your man under 
your hand, as we had on this occasion, but still 
he will escape, for to make an arrest without any 
shred of evidence is mere foolishness and leads to 
unpleasant letters from the authorities. In this 
case, as it happened, the escape of the malefactor 
was only for a little while. A week later our good, 
friendly shepherd was brought in by another party 
which included a man who really knew the coun- 
try, and he was sent down to Salonika to render 
account of himself. What happened to him I do 
not know, nor did any of us inquire. The subject 
was one which we avoided for a long time. And 
though we sought diligently for our interpreter, 
we did not see him again. He had disappeared, 
going perhaps to some other part of the front to 
protest his devotion to M. Venezelos, and his en- 
thusiasm for the cause of the Allied arms, con- 
fident in his security from detection, and not a little 
contemptuous of those whom he professed to serve. 

One feels that contempt everywhere in the 
country. The people are accustomed to war. 
Throughout the years they have been subject to 

142 



CONCERNING SPIES 



quick alarms; sudden and violent death is a thing 
which they understand thoroughly. They have 
seen the light of burning homes and crops; they 
have mourned, and they have rejoiced. And to 
them we seem to be strange warriors, foolish and 
helpless people, without decision or determination. 
If when we found that shepherd among his goats 
one of us had shot him and another had put a 
bullet through the brain of our interpreter, the 
people of the land would have appreciated the ac- 
tions, but our fashion of sending down even known 
spies to Salonika and affording them a fair trial 
with full opportunities for friends to lie freely on 
their behalf— that is not appreciated except as a 
sign of our amazing madness. The Germans would 
not be so foolish; they would shoot at once and 
not even trouble to ask if they had shot the right 
man— and that is a policy which commands the 
respect of the Macedonian. To the minds of these 
people it appears that a nation which pursues such 
a course is far stronger and more likely to win. 

It is so easy to look back on the early stages of 
a campaign and to say "if we had done this and 
this, our way would have been less difficult," but 
the exercise is not often profitable. It is true that 
if we had dealt in more drastic fashion with spies 
in the beginning they would not be such a nuisance 
today, but it does not appear that we could have 
behaved differently. We have our inbred enthu- 

H3 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

siasm for a fair trial, and we have gone about the 
earth forcing the fair trial upon peoples who lack 
appreciation of justice for so many centuries. It 
does not seem to matter to us that our actions 
are regarded as foolishness and weakness; it is 
our custom and we intend to carry it out. And 
the appearance of the map of the world suggests 
that our foolishness has been profitable in the end. 
Perhaps, in spite of the open contempt of the vil- 
lagers of Macedonia our policy will prove to have 
been profitable with them also. One can only 
note the fact that it is very hard as yet to see 
that it has been anything but a hampering nuisance. 



144 



CHAPTER XIV 

OUR FEASTING 

THERE was once a most experienced warrior 
who made a song in praise of the Eternal 
Goodness. In his song he put a little list of bene- 
fits which he had received, the things in his life 
for which he had been most joyously grateful. In 
that list there is one line which only a soldier can 
appreciate fully: "Thou preparest a table before 
me in the presence of mine enemies. . . . My 
cup runneth over." 

For such a table as one usually finds in the 
presence of the enemy is a rudimentary affair. 
There is food and there is drink, and one can say little 
more about it. It is, of course, adapted to that 
business of sustaining life and renewing energy 
which is the primary purpose of all food, but it 
leaves out of account the other business of re- 
freshing the whole being by a little space of delight 
and enjoyment. That does not enter into the pro- 
gram. When you sit down by the roadside or in 
a hasty trench to excavate the contents of a tin 
of bully beef with a clasp knife and your fingers, 

H5 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

chewing meanwhile at those obdurate biscuits 
whose only virtue is that they are handy to carry 
about — when you do these things, you know that 
you are being nourished, and you do not expect 
anything else. So, too, when you take a mouth- 
ful of luke-warm, chlorinated water from your 
bottle, you know that your thirst is being slaked 
and that in consequence you will be able to endure 
for a little while longer. Perhaps if your tempera- 
ment were unusually ascetic you would be glad 
to have a life so shorn of accessories and to have 
robbed the body of one of its pleasures, but the 
army as a whole is not made up of ascetics. It is 
made up of a jolly, full-blooded people who have 
learnt through hardship and privation to appre- 
ciate the good things of life, to desire them and 
to enjoy them to the full whenever they have an 
opportunity. This being the case, most of us would 
be glad to subscribe to the limit of our ability 
towards a testimonial to the man who is respon- 
sible for the Expeditionary Force Canteens. That 
man, whoever he may be, is the chief benefactor 
of our armies in the field, and especially of our 
armies in Macedonia. 

No praise can be too high for the work of the 
department of the Quartermaster-General. Quite 
apart from the huge business of equipment, that 
department has to feed our millions on all the 
fronts day after day, and the task is admirably 

146 



OUR FEASTING 



accomplished. To every man there comes each 
day the food required to keep him fit for his work. 
It comes in generous measure, and in really won- 
derful variety, considering the difficulties of the 
business. But the variety cannot be great enough 
to satisfy the very human craving for an occasional 
change, for sharp flavors, and for sweetness. With 
jam and with onions the authorities do their best 
for our palates, and their achievements are really 
wonderful, but they do not reach to the end of 
healthy desire. Filling the gap there comes the 
work of the Expeditionary Force Canteens, those 
glorified tuck-shops of the army. 

Here and there in Macedonia there stand great 
marquees with signboards bearing the words of 
cheer, "Expeditionary Force Canteen." There are 
not many of them. There is, of course, a big head- 
quarter place in Salonika. There is one at Horti- 
ack, and another, I believe, at Stavros. At the 
forty-fifth kilo on the Seres road there is a kind 
of branch establishment, and there is one at Janes. 
When we reached that place and found that it 
possessed a canteen, we began to remember the 
things which we really liked, and mess presidents 
became suddenly busy collecting money. 

Messing is always done by companies in Mace- 
donia. Battalions are so often split up and their 
parts separated that it would not be possible to 
run one mess for all the officers of the battalion. 



H7 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

The officers of each company club together, and the 
unluckiest is appointed mess president. His duty 
it is to buy anything which he can find to buy, 
to reason with the cook, to make the meals as 
delectable as possible, and to endure all day long 
the reproaches of the little family whose house- 
keeper he is. Also he has to collect from his family 
such sums as will pay for the various articles which 
he has purchased; he has to learn to give soft 
answers and to prepare balance-sheets, and to 
possess his soul in patience when somebody says 
that he has no money and that he will have to wait 
till the field cashier comes round. 

For of course check books are useless in that 
uncivilized land. No one appreciates the docu- 
ments, and no one ever thinks of writing them. 
Money is obtained from the field cashier, a benevo- 
lent gentleman who pays periodical visits to the 
different units, with bags and boxes full of the 
paper money of Greece. In exchange for a little 
writing on a scrap of paper he presents you with 
notes which you carry patiently round the country 
till the mess president finds an E.F.C., or your 
servant decides that he would like his wages. 
Macedonia would break the heart of a spendthrift 
millionaire. Try as he might he would not be able 
to find any way of getting rid of his money. You 
cannot spend in a country in which there is noth- 
ing to buy, and in consequence funds are always 

148 



OUR FEASTING 



plentiful on those rare, delightful occasions when 
it is discovered that there is a canteen in the 
neighborhood of the camp. 

I brought away with me the price list which I 
obtained when I went to that canteen at Janes. 
It is a big, imposing sheet, and it contains the 
names and prices of over three hundred articles, 
any one of which the man on active service would 
dearly love to possess, though he would find it diffi- 
cult to carry some of them about with him. There 
are belts and biscuits and butter, cheese, chutney 
and corkscrews, figs, footballs and fly-papers. 
Handkerchiefs, honey and haddocks, laces, lard and 
lentils, sauce, sausages and soap — all these and 
many, many more delectable things are offered. 
To glance through that list in a crowded marquee 
in the heart of Macedonia is to gain a feeling of 
having come home all at once, with the freedom 
of the Army and Navy Stores and Selfridge's and 
Harrods. That feeling only wears off a little when 
you proceed to work through the ten-deep crowd 
before the counter, and find out what you can 
really buy. 

For of course at an up-country place you could 
not expect to find all the three hundred-odd 
articles in stock at the same time. Transport is 
too great a problem, and the demand is too fierce 
The Janes canteen is the center of the hopes of 
all the units which work on the Doiran front. Day 



*49 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

by day officers and men and limbers come cantering 
in from the hills which hide the firing line, with 
long lists of goods required and with bundles of 
notes in their pockets. No sooner is the canteen 
stocked than it is emptied again. Packing cases 
dance through it, hardly pausing on their way, and 
go rollicking off to cheer the inhabitants of the 
dug-outs over there where the Bulgar shells are 
bursting. And in addition to the people in the 
firing line there are all the units which are scat- 
tered about the country, making roads or doing 
other necessary work within a ten-mile radius. 
Everyone wants everything he can get, and the 
job of the canteen manager is not an enviable one. 
We did our shopping magnificently in that mar- 
quee. The great advantage of the active service 
life is that it abolishes fads. The man who pro- 
tested in peace time that if he ate pineapple he 
came out in pink spots all over quite forgets his 
affliction when he has not tasted fruit of any kind 
for three weeks. You can buy what you like within 
reason and be sure that it will be appreciated. 
Only once did the canteen disappoint us, and that 
was when it sold us some tins of horrible little 
sausages, of the thickness and general consistency 
of a lead pencil. For the rest the things were 
good and more than good, and the mules objected 
sincerely to the load which we packed into the 
limber to take away with us, for all the officers' 

150 



OUR FEASTING 



messes of the battalion and the sergeants' mess 
and the regimental canteen had representatives 
with that expedition, and after we had finished in 
the dry goods department we went round to 
another marquee where cases with fascinating in- 
scriptions were stacked, and proceeded to buy 
alcoholic beverages. 

For the rest of that week the various messes 
were busy giving vainglorious dinners, and ran- 
sacking the battalion and the neighborhood for 
guests. Any excuse is good enough for a festivity 
in such a country, and it is something to have an 
unfamiliar face at the table when you have been 
feeding with the same four or five men at every 
meal of every day for weeks on end. Those were 
the days when the mess cooks of the companies 
entered into fierce competitions and pestered the 
mess presidents with suggestions every morning 
They were days when we professed to grow weary 
of asparagus and began to criticize lobster and 
to be fussy over brands of condensed milk. Also 
we compared brands of stout and whisky and quar- 
relled over the merits of various liquors — we who, 
a week before, had been thankful enough for a 
pint of Macedonian beer wherewith to wash down 
our rations. 

One never knows how things will appear to 
other people. I am wondering now if all this 
will seem very greedy and gluttonous, as though 



151 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

we were only concerned to eat and to drink and 
had no appreciation of the grim nature of the 
business to which we were sworn. There may 
be some who will think of us like that, some stern 
souls on whose breakfast table there are porridge 
and kippers and bacon every morning and who 
always eat mutton because they dislike beef. But 
it does not occur to me that we need any defence 
for rejoicing in all those nice things, for getting 
a great deal of real, keen pleasure out of them, 
and for thanking our lucky stars that we had come 
to a place where such things were to be obtained. 
A table prepared in the presence of our enemies 
— a cup running over. 



*5* 



CHAPTER XV 

MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA 

THERE are few things more irritating than to 
sit down before a good meal, and to realize 
with sudden, painful clearness that you cannot 
eat anything at all, that you must crawl away to 
your bivouac and lie there very unhappily for the 
next four or five hours, unable to smoke or to 
read or to take any real interest in anything. To 
that annoying fate malaria condemns its victims, 
over and over again. 

I have already explained that when our men 
were sent to Salonika they were committed to a 
war against Nature, a war against rock and swamp 
and wilderness, a war against hill and valley, a war 
against storm and sun. At the same time they 
were committed to a war against the mosquito and 
all its works, chief of which is the spreading of 
that detestable fever. There are wide spaces in 
that land where every battalion which occupies 
the ground is certain to be decimated. You could 
not be more positively sure of reducing its fight- 
ing strength if you were to put it in the most 
perilous part of the line in one of the big offen- 

153 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



sives in France. Every battalion which goes into 
the Struma valley through the summer months 
knows quite well that it will be losing men day 
after day, week after week while it remains there, 
and for long enough after it may be returned to 
the hills. The same is true of the valleys of the 
Galika and the Vardar, and of the low land round 
by Lake Langaza. 

Of course precautions are taken. The quinine 
parade is a standing order in the Salonika armies. 
Every day the companies are lined up and marched 
off to the doctor's headquarters. There the men 
pass in single file, and receive each of them five 
grains of quinine, with a drink of water to wash 
it down. How much quinine they consume in the 
course of a year I should not like to say, for all 
are served alike. Some of them are very sorrowful 
about it at first, but in the end it becomes as much 
a matter of course as the cleaning of the rifle. 

Then, too, mosquito netting is issued to the units 
stationed in dangerous areas, and the camps are 
constantly inspected by medical dignitaries who 
refuse to be contented till they are sure that all 
the men know how to close up their bivouacs with 
it. Supervision of the mosquito defences is not 
the least of one's little worries, and it adds seri- 
ously to the burden of the medical officer's life. 
But in spite of these precautions, malaria continues 
to claim its victims. The quinine parade does not 



154 



MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA 

■ i 

fortify them against it, nor do the nets protect 
them. Day by day fresh cases are reported. Day 
by day the ambulances are taking men off to hospi- 
tal, while company commanders mourn over their 
parade states. 

The criminal responsible for all this is a mos- 
quito which always hangs its head with a de- 
jected and crime-laden air when it sits down. 
Mosquitoes which are not engaged in distributing 
malaria rest quite differently, with their bodies 
either parallel to the surface to which they are 
clinging, or so inclined that the head is higher 
than the tail. But when you find one whose tail 
is in the air while its head is tucked down, you 
may know that it is a poison-bearer and an insect 
to be avoided. If one of those mosquitoes has 
bitten you the next fortnight or so will prove 
whether or not malaria has power to touch you. 

The amount of trouble those insects give is the 
proof of the respect with which the Army regards 
them. The dangerous areas are, of course, the low- 
lands near water. For this reason the camps are 
always pitched on the highest possible ground. 
This may and usually does mean that you are a 
mile and more from the water supply, but that does 
not matter in the least. At one time we were very 
busy along the Galika valley by Karadza Kadi, and 
every night we climbed to roost high on the hills 
to the east, and water had to be carried nearly 

155 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

two miles to the camp. It was a great nuisance, 
but it was quite unavoidable. It is dangerous even 
to walk into the valley after sunset, for one would 
certainly be bitten, and a mosquito bite can be 
quite as disastrous as a bullet wound. So it was 
that at sunset we left the low ground to the un- 
disturbed possession of the natives and retired up 
the rocky steeps to our camp among the scrub, 
but even so we were not altogether safe. A few 
of those industrious poison-distributors usually fol- 
lowed us, and the medical officer was in danger of 
wearing himself out over the supervision of mos- 
quito nets, while the nervous people doubled their 
dose of quinine and took ten grains daily. 

The soldier's business is, of course, a double one. 
He has to do all possible damage to the enemy, and 
he has to keep from being damaged unnecessarily 
himself. It is quite an important part of his work 
to take care of himself and to preserve himself 
in good condition for the hour when he may be 
called upon to go forward into danger and fight. 
If he fails to take care of himself he is not a good 
soldier; if he seeks to disable himself he will cer- 
tainly be court-martialled, and ought to be shot. 
All these statements are the most elementary max- 
ims of military life, and they are brought to the 
notice of the soldier very early in his training, and 
are impressed upon him time after time through 
the duration of his service. 

156 



MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA 



And they are realized quite clearly. The aver- 
age soldier knows well enough that he has no 
right to expose himself uselessly, that he would 
be doing wrong, for example, if he were to put 
up his hand above the parapet of the trench in 
the hope that a stray bullet might give him a 
trifling wound that would get him a holiday in 
hospital. But a man may understand this and yet 
fail to grasp the fact that it is quite as criminal 
an act to expose himself to the risk of a mosquito 
bite. It is such a silly thing after all. In the 
morning there is the red, itching lump on hand or 
arm or face, but it does not seem important, and 
it is not easy to grasp the fact that that itching lump 
may be a far more serious wound than many a 
bullet hole. For that reason it is not easy to im- 
press on the men the urgent need for protecting 
themselves against this particular enemy. 

The amount of mosquito net that is issued is not 
always adequate. If it is to afford any protection 
it must be most carefully arranged, and sometimes 
it seems altogether too much trouble to make the 
arrangements. Moreover, summer nights in Mace- 
donia can be terribly oppressive at times, and 
sleepers are liable to be restless, to toss and turn 
and destroy their defences. Through carelessness, 
through accident, and at times through sheer neces- 
sity the way is opened, and the mosquito is given 
its opportunity. 

157 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

There are, of course, very many who go un- 
harmed through it all. For some reason which the 
doctors may understand, they are immune, and the 
poison does not touch them. They are on parade 
every day cheerful and undisturbed. But there are 
the others who are taught swiftly and most un- 
comfortably the full meaning of the mosquito bite 
which seemed so small a thing when it was in- 
flicted. 

One can never tell where the next victim will 
be found. After a fortnight in a malarial district 
there is a touch of excitement to enliven every 
morning. When the company or the battalion falls 
in on parade there is always the question — who is 
missing? It may be an invaluable platoon sergeant, 
it may the battalion nuisance. The fever does 
not respect strength, and very often it leaves 
weakness unharmed. But almost certainly there 
will be a vacant place somewhere or other, and 
someone will be shivering dismally under piled 
blankets, or gasping for breath and dreaming of 
cool drinks, and absorbing large doses of quinine. 

Sometimes a man will have so severe an attack 
that there will be nothing for it but to pack him 
off to hospital at once. On the other hand there 
are many cases when after two or three days the 
victim will be back at work, thinking that the 
trouble has passed away, and that he will not 
have to fall out of his place in the ranks. There 

15s 



MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA 

are some men, especially among those who have 
suffered from the fever before in other countries 
who are able to carry on. I knew one major who 
was helpless for two or three days out of every 
month, but did contrive to remain with his 
battalion and to get through his work. And there 
are others who are forced into hospital every 
now and then, but find their way back every time. 
Others again fight against the trouble for weeks 
but are at the last driven out of the country by 
it, to finish their soldiering in other lands. 

Fighting malaria is not an amusement that can 
be recommended. The tricks of it are so numer- 
ous. Sometimes an attack will come on with due 
warning which gives time for steps to be taken 
to reduce the fury of it, and at other times 
the onslaught will be so sudden that it has devel- 
oped into an undeniable fact in two minutes. It 
is quite possible to sit down to a meal feeling 
perfectly well, and even to get through one course, 
and then to be compelled to leave the rest and 
go away to put up as well as may be with the 
discomfort of the following hours. 

And of course that leads in time to weakness 
which becomes more and more pronounced. Very 
many of our men in Macedonia have rebelled so 
sturdily against the idea of giving in that they 
have struggled on, week after week. They have 
refused to attend the sick parade or to confess that 

159 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

there was anything the matter with them until 
at last their weakness has betrayed them, and 
their trouble has been discovered simply be- 
cause it was not possible for them to work or 
to march any more. They had realized that ideal 
to which only the best soldiers can ever attain. 
They had gone on while their limbs would carry 
them, disdaining to yield while strength remained 
to set one foot before the other. And there is 
something that hangs between the comic and the 
utterly pathetic in their disgust when they find 
that it is indeed the end of endeavor for them for 
the time. 

Doubtless those who are in authority over us 
know what malaria has cost our armies in Mace- 
donia. Whether or not they realized what that 
cost would be when the adventure was planned 
is another of those questions which may possibly 
be answered in the future. For the present it is 
enough to say that it must be taken into account 
in any consideration of the work and achievements 
of the forces which were sent to that uncomfortable 
land. It must be remembered as scrupulously as 
must the nature of the country and all that diffi- 
culty of transport of which I have written. It is 
another of the big troubles with which General 
Sarrail and his subordinate commanders have had 
to contend, and it is not possible to do justice to 
any commander unless you make full allowance 

160 



MOSQUITOES AND MALARIA 

for his difficulties, and the critics who sit so easily 
at home and write of what should have been accom- 
plished in Macedonia must, in common honesty, 
give due consideration to all the condit ; ons which 
have surrounded the work of the forces sent to 
Salonika. 

And a sick soldier is something more than a 
man absent from his place. He is so definitely 
and defiantly a nuisance. He is a person who must 
be tended and cared for. There must be people to 
look after him, ambulances to carry him about, 
lorries to bring up the special things which he 
requires. Multiply him by a few thousands, and 
you must have an elaborate, well-staffed organi- 
zation at work, doing all kinds of secondary jobs 
which would not be there to be done if there were 
no sickness. With one hand the fever has with- 
drawn men from their work by thousands; with 
the other it has forced on the commanders the 
necessity of maintaining in the country a large 
number of non-combatants. Any increase in the 
number of its non-combatant members weakens 
an army, and more especially in such a country as 
this where it is so difficult a matter to bring up 
the necessary supplies. 

That is a point which is frequently overlooked, 
and yet it is of the highest importance. Before 
you go to war in any country it is essential to 
know what amount of manpower will be absorbed 

161 



C AMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

in taking care of the fighters, and especially if it 
is difficult country to which all supplies must be 
carried a long distance by sea. For as the diffi- 
culty of the country increases, so will the number 
of men employed on transport work increase, and 
food must be brought for each of these as well 
as for the men who do the actual fighting. And if 
in addition it is a country where much sickness is 
to be expected, the number of essential non- 
combatants will be greater than ever. The best 
army, from the point of view of a commander, 
is one in which a hundred per cent of its members 
are fighters. The lower the percentage of fighters, 
the more difficult it becomes to win battles, or, 
indeed, to go into battle at all. And all those 
heroic, necessary people who belong to the medical 
service of the Salonika forces are a source of weak- 
ness to those forces, even while it is true that 
without them no military operations would be pos- 
sible in the land. 



162 



CHAPTER XVI 

THESE ARE THE HEROES 

THE whole body of the facts and figures con- 
cerning the hospital organization in Macedonia 
is in the keeping of the authorities, and there it 
must remain till the time when the war shall have 
become no more than a memory and all the truth 
of the world's effort may be told. In those coming 
days we shall learn, perhaps, the number of the 
people who were engaged in that service, the 
number of the marquees and ambulances which 
were kept so constantly busy, and the cost of that 
great work of caring for the sick and wounded. 
Certain it is that no ordinary member of the 
Salonika expeditionary force could even guess at 
the extent of the labor or the magnitude of the 
means which had to be employed to deal with the 
task. 

We who belonged to the fighting units could 
only know that wherever we went the Geneva 
cross was never very far away. Ever and again 
as we marched through the land we would find 
it flying over some compact little camp in a fold 

i6 3 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

of the hills. On all the roads there were the ambu- 
lances hurrying to and fro. On that railway 
which runs from Salonika to Janes and beyond 
there is the hospital train carrying down its load 
to the sea every day, and in Salonika Bay the 
green and white hospital ships are coming and 
going all the time. In Macedonia you may be 
far from newspapers, from tobacco which a reason- 
able being can smoke, from the more pleasing 
varieties of food and from all the minor comforts 
of life, but you are never very far from some kind 
of a hospital. 

The broad lines of the organization are roughly 
these. The medical firing line is, of course, held 
by the medical officers of the battalions, who have 
their orderlies and stretcher-bearers to assist them. 
The medical officer has his Aid Post in the camp, 
where he can attend to the sick, where his drugs 
and implements are stored, where he can remove 
offending teeth, administer quinine or that terror 
of the Army which is known as Number Nine, and 
take the temperature of the latest victim of malaria. 
Frequently he has also an ambulance drawn by 
horses or mules which accompanies the unit on its 
travels, but of course this has to be left behind 
when the nature of the country makes wheeled 
transport impossible and all the luggage and sup- 
plies have to be carried on pack mules. On these 
occasions the fate of the individual who is taken 

164 



THESE ARE THE HEROES 

ill on the march is unhappy. If he collapses by 
the wayside there is nothing to carry him, except 
the stretchers, and it is necessary to make him un- 
derstand quite clearly that at all cost he must drag 
himself along to the end of the day's journey. 

In the second line come the field ambulances. 
They are mobile, and it is their business to go 
with troops on the move, to pick up as many of 
the casualties as the battalions cannot keep with 
them, and to hand them on in due season. The 
ordinary field ambulance consists of a few ambu- 
lance wagons and a small camp. If the unit to 
which it is attached is moving through difficult 
country with pack transport, the ambulance gen- 
erally looks for an easy way round, so that at the 
end of the day or at some time during the next 
day it may be ready to take over any men who 
have fallen ill. The soldier who is hurt or at- 
tacked by fever or dysentery is treated first at the 
Aid Post of his own unit. If his condition does 
not improve and he is unable to journey on with 
the rest, he is handed over to the field ambulance 
where he may be treated again for a little while 
if his illness is only slight. If he does not get 
better, or if the ambulance becomes unduly 
crowded, he is passed on to the third line. 

This is composed of the casualty clearing sta- 
tions. They are permanent camps established at 
the most advanced position possible. Thus there 

!*5 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

is one at Stavros and another at Lahana and a third 
at Janes. They are really miniature hospitals, and 
to be sent into one of them is to experience the un- 
imaginable luxury of sleeping once more between 
sheets and on a real bed. The sufferer may remain 
in one of these stations for a long time, if he is 
considered too ill to make the journey to a hospital, 
or if it is thought that he will very soon be well 
again. Behind the casualty clearing stations, and 
especially on the Seres road, there are occasional 
small field hospitals which receive and keep for a 
little while those who are not well enough to make 
the whole journey back to the base, or who are 
only slightly ill and may be expected to recover 
within a week or so. Tucked away out of sight 
near these little hospitals you will always find a 
graveyard, a little space of ground very carefully 
fenced and cleared, with the neat, sad mounds 
in precise order, and the little white crosses with 
their brief inscriptions, bearing witness that some 
have not lived long enough even to die within 
sight of the sea. That always seems the hardest, 
crudest part of war, that finding of death in the 
safe places behind the lines. There is nothing un- 
seemly in the death that is found in the course 
of ordinary duty; that is all in the contract and 
it is not a very grievous thing. But it is hard that 
when a man has lived long enough to find safety 
with his face turned homeward death should over- 

166 



THESE ARE THE HEROES 

take him. There is indeed a crescendo of sadness, 
and if those graves behind the lines are pitiful, 
still more so are those which have been dug in 
Malta, that island of hospitals, and most pitiful 
of all is the death which comes on the hospital ship 
as the coast of England lifts and rises from the 
sea. 

No one who has played any part, however small, 
in war would seek to emphasize the sadness of it. 
That is not our job. If it must be done, it can 
very well be left to newspaper correspondents 
and others whose business it is to watch from a 
distance and comment on the course of things. If 
I have mentioned these sorrowful, remote graves 
it is simply because it is necessary to insist that 
they would be more numerous by far if it were 
not for the infinite care of the medical service. The 
day of miracles is not past. If you could go to 
those hospitals which stand about Salonika, if you 
could see the battles that are fought day and 
night through all the hours across the broken 
bodies of our men, you would understand. If you 
could work your way down as I have done through 
field ambulance and clearing station to the base, 
and lie day after day in one of those long, bright 
wards, you would know that wonders are still per- 
formed upon the earth. 

From the moment a man is carried away from 
his unit he is surrounded by such unceasing tender- 

167 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

ness, by such a wealth of devotion and skill. It is 
bad, of course, for those who find their trouble on 
the Struma front, and must come back down all 
the tormenting length of the Seres road, but every 
possible measure is taken to keep them from pain 
and suffering, and if they are very weak the journey 
is broken so that it may be made in easy stages, 
with rests in between at the little hospitals which 
stand by the side of the road. In those hospitals 
there are lavish care and unflagging attention to 
cherish and fan the little spark of strength that it 
may glow through all the body, giving power to 
endure the next stage of the journey. 

No praise can be too high for the men and women 
who are bound to that service. How they find 
power and the heart to carry on with their work 
I do not know, but their zeal is unfailing, and their 
cheerful kindness goes shining on through all the 
days and nights. There was one day when I came 
to Sarigol, that unhappy village which lies next 
below Janes. The hospital train had just come into 
the station on its journey down to Salonika. There 
were the long carriages, and the vans that had been 
fitted with cots; one could see the forms of the 
men as they lay in the comfortable shade, and the 
orderlies hurrying to and fro. At the door of one 
of the vans two nurses paused for a moment, look- 
ing out. I had not seen an Englishwoman for 
months, and there was something in the mere sight 

168 



THESE ARE THE HEROES 



of them that took one by the throat. They stood 
there, just a moment, looking out over that alien 
land. It must have been very familiar to them, 
the village with its queer, mud-plastered hovels^ 
the tiny church with the great bearded black- 
robed priest lumbering down towards it, and the 
parched plain rolling away to the mountains. They 
stood there, and one would have said that they 
were a little weary, weary of the heat and the 
plague of the flies and the unending labor of their 
life, and for the moment they were forgetting to 
smile. There was a call from the shadows inside 
the van and they turned, both together, and the 
smiles were back on their faces, not the forced 
smiles of duty, but shining smiles that told of the 
kindness burning within. 

Of the trains by which a man journeys in the 
course of his life there are a few, here and there, 
which he remembers with gratitude and joy. We 
have all of us our memories of the happy trains, 
which carried us so pleasantly to gladness, and 
not the least of mine is that hospital train which 
runs from Janes to Salonika. For there came 
the day when in my turn I was put on that train 
with blankets and pillows to comfort me, with 
pleasant food and drink to hearten me, and with 
liberty to lie quite still and watch Macedonia, that 
admirable country, sliding past as I journeyed so 
smoothly down to the sea. The nurses were busy 

i6p 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

in another part of the train, but there were the 
soft-stepping orderlies, quick to anticipate every 
want and desire, and once when we stopped for a 
quarter of an hour at the station called Salamanli 
there came a small, delightful music. Before that 
hour and since I have cursed gramophones with 
the heartiest sincerity, but at that time there was 
nothing but delight, and one did not realize that 
a machine had anything to do with it but thought 
only that four entirely admirable people were 
singing Gilbert and Sullivan quartettes with skill 
and enthusiasm. In such comfort and serene un- 
happiness one could have journeyed for days on 
end, and that train stands to me for a symbol of 
what has been and is continually being done for 
our men when sickness or wounds cry halt to their 
campaigning. All that can be bought for their 
healing is purchased and brought from the ends 
of the earth, and with it there comes a devotion 
which could never be bought, for which no money 
that was ever coined could pay. Some of those 
orderlies of the Royal Army Medical Corps are 
heroes of the most dogged and determined order. 
It is not for them to do one flaming deed in the 
full tide of battle and thus to win splendor for 
their names. It is their part to go on day after 
day doing unpleasant things with cheerful readi- 
ness — day after day. And with them there are the doc- 
tors who have left their easy homes, and the nurses 

170 



THESE ARE THE HEROES 

who have come from all the lands to play their 
part, to bear their portion of the burden. 

As on that excellent train, so in the hospitals 
round Salonika they are doing their work with the 
same unfailing devotion. The staffs of our hospi- 
tals everywhere deserve all that can be given them 
of honor and reward, but those who have served 
in Salonika deserve even more than the others. 
It is so unpleasant a town. In Alexandria or Cairo 
or Malta it is at least possible to escape in leisure 
hours and to go to cheerful, jolly places and to for- 
get pain for a little while, but I do not know what 
there can be of pleasant recreation in that town 
which stands looking away towards Olympus. 
Life in those hospitals must be a most unmiti- 
gated form of exile, with none of the ameliorations 
of a civilized life to make it tolerable. Our nurses 
there have known what it is to be spat upon in 
those filthy streets, and there is nothing in the 
streets to make them worth visiting. It is just a 
matter of work and sleep, with a considerable 
chance of sickness thrown in for the sake of variety. 
Sometimes they will tell you of friends across in 
Alexandria, and of the letters they write telling 
of the good time they are having. For my own 
part I do not love Alexandria at all, but I know 
that there are shop windows with interesting things 
to examine, that there are wide, sunswept streets, 
and English people passing to and fro, and women 

171 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

in pretty frocks, and a most admirable place for 
tea near to the top of Rue Cherif Pacha, on the 
left-hand side. And anyhow one would rather be 
anywhere on earth than in Salonika. 

But they do not complain, those brave, kind 
women — they work their miracles instead. You 
may lie in your place day after day and watch 
how they bring men back from the very gates of 
death. It is a fine thing to see, that relentless 
struggle for a life. You may have enough knowl- 
edge to appreciate it, to know how small are the 
chances of recovery, how it must all depend on 
care, science having done all in its power. And 
you note every morning a little improvement, a 
little accession of strength. There is a touch of 
healthier color in the poor, worn face, a little 
light of interest in the eyes; presently there is 
movement and reasonable speech, and the dark 
shadow passes away. By the time they are making 
ready to take him to the hospital ship, you know 
with exact and definite knowledge that only un- 
failing service has prevented the erection of another 
of those little crosses which mark the resting 
places of the men who could not live long enough 
to get home. 



172 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 

IN my early days in the country, when we lived 
for a time on the high plateau by Hortiack, we 
would sit outside our huts in the evening and watch 
the shipping in the bay with an interest only to 
be understood by those who have been in exile. 
It is some mitigation to be able to look at a ship. 
It stands for freedom, freedom to go out across 
the seas of the world and come at last to your 
own place. One is apt, I suppose, to grow rather 
sentimental in those distant places. After all it 
is almost the only luxury. 

There would be ships of all nations with strange 
and violent designs painted along their sides, and 
there would be the brave dingy tramps which sail 
so fearlessly under our own flag, longing for a 
chance to settle a submarine. War boats of every 
kind would be there, and transports moving up from 
the sea with their burden of troops. And most 
beautiful of all the hospital ships, painted green 
and white with the great red crosses promising to 
all who sailed on them a space of rest and peace, 

T 73 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

a refuge prepared from all the weariness and tu- 
mult of war. 

It will not, perhaps, be hard to understand why 
we looked at those green and white ships with 
an intense, peculiar affection. Holidays have no 
great place in the scheme of things in Macedonia. 
The men in France have their leave to look for- 
ward to. They know that every few months they 
will get their days of release. They will be able 
to cross to England, to be with their own people, 
to walk the streets of their towns and be in the 
keeping of their homes. But there is no such pros- 
pect in front of the man who lands at Salonika. 
Very, very rarely it happens that a man who has 
been in that country for a year is miraculously pre- 
sented with permission to spend a fortnight at 
home, but those instances are so scarce as to be 
negligible. One you get to Salonika you have 
every chance of staying there for the duration of 
the war unless the authorities should decide in 
some moment of wisdom that the expedition is un- 
profitable and that our armies would be more use- 
ful elsewhere. That being the case we should have 
been more than human if we had not realized that 
those hospital ships offered our only chance of a 
holiday, our only hope of finding our way home. 

I can see that I shall have to write this rather 
carefully or some petulant pacifist or one of the 
other enemies of our nation will be twisting my 

174 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 



words to mean that our men in Macedonia are 
discontented and mutinous and seeking every op- 
portunity to escape. That, of course, would be the 
most damnable libel on a gallant and devoted body 
of men that could ever be devised by the most 
lying and malignant Hun. There is the widest 
possible difference between realizing that a thing 
is desirable and setting to work to obtain it. We 
had come to the country to do something, and the 
fact that that something had turned out to be 
monotonous and entirely unlike our dream of war 
was irritating, but it had to be done and we meant 
to do it. At the same time it was only natural 
that we should realize that it would be a happy 
thing to journey down to the sea on one of those 
pretty ships, and that, whatever their sufferings, 
those who made that journey were enviable people. 
That after all is the great consolation of the 
soldier in a vast citizen army such as this which 
the British Empire has created in the hour of its 
necessity. It is rather different with the born 
soldier, the man who loves fighting for its own 
sake, the man who would have been in the army 
in any event and was probably serving before the 
war broke out. He is the spiritual descendant of 
those old adventurers who in the distant past left 
their own land when it was at peace and went to 
serve in the armies of other nations in a life-long 
quest of conflict. Such a man is liable to fume 

175 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



and fret when for a time he is laid aside. There 
are no ties of home to bind him. There are no 
distant voices calling to him. One land is as good 
as another, one face as fair as another and the 
camp is his chosen habitation. But such as he 
do not at any time form the bulk of a nation, 
especially of such a nation as our own where the 
fighting has for so long been in the hands of pro- 
fessionals and the born adventurers go naturally 
to the sea. Our armies must inevitably contain a 
large precentage of men who cannot know real 
happiness and content away from their homes. 
Always they must hear the little whispering of 
remembered voices; before their eyes there must 
always be the vision of some little house in which, 
for them, all the excellence and beauty of living 
are contained. 

For these men there is a comfort to sustain them 
through all the pain of wounds and sickness. In 
the hour of darkness and dereliction there is light. 
How often has the story been told of our lads in 
France when, with their bodies shattered by great 
wounds, a smile has come to wipe the pain from 
their faces and they have controlled their quiver- 
ing lips to whisper, "Me for Blighty." And if that 
consolation is effectual in France, can you not 
realize how far more effectual it must be on the 
distant battlefields where the man had no hope of 
seeing his home while the war endured and even, 



1/6 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 



it might be, for many months after peace returned 
to the earth? If you think of our men of the Ter- 
ritorials and the New Armies who have been in 
India, in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Macedonia since 
a few months after the war began, can you wonder 
that they think longingly of the hospital ships? 
That is not wonderful at all. The thing which 
is wonderful is that, in spite of the longing, there 
should be such consistent and sustained efforts to 
avoid making that desired journey. It is and will 
remain wonderful that our men who are sick or 
wounded in those far lands should so often insist 
that there is nothing the matter with them and 
that they are perfectly well able to carry on. I 
remember one man, a gray-headed fellow of forty. 
He had been telling me of trouble in his home, of 
sickness and the failing health of his wife. His 
heart was torn with anxiety and he was in a mood 
to curse Macedonia, and the day that led him 
to the recruiting office. A week later I saw there 
was something wrong with him. By all the signs 
malaria had laid hold of him, but he stood up 
before me, shaken as he was with the fever, and 
lied to me, declaring that he was perfectly well, 
and it was a fortnight before weakness conquered 
him and he had to be taken away. And he was 
only one of many, of very, very many. Over and 
over again you may see it, out there on the far 
fringes of the war. I have seen it in Egypt, down 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

on the edge of the eternal sand, I have seen it in 
hospitals in Alexandria, and across the length and 
breadth of Macedonia. "I'm all right," the story 
runs. "Why don't they send me back?" "See you 
again in a week, boys," said one of our men as 
they carried him away to the Field Ambulance, 
and we heard later that he died a week after the 
hospital ship brought him to England. 

But I began this chapter with the intention of 
telling of the way out of Macedonia, the way of 
the green and white ships over which so many 
thousands have passed, not through any skill of 
the enemy but simply by reason of the malice of 
the land. It might be as well to carry out that 
original intention. 

We who sat on that plateau under the shadow 
of Kotos used to watch the hospital ships and to 
make small jokes among ourselves as to when our 
turns for the journey would come, and what the 
trouble would be that would carry us out of the 
land. We went down to the plains and the char- 
acteristic troubles of the country began to pick 
and choose among us, selecting their victims with 
fantastic uncertainty, and those poor little jests 
were carried on. "Hullo, booked your passage on 
a green and white?" would be the question put to 
any one who turned up in the morning with a 
strikingly yellow complexion. "Give my regards 
to Leicester Square," would be the last words 

i 7 8 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 



called after the ambulance as it trotted away, 
carrying someone who protested with violence that 
he was perfectly well. To one after another the 
summons came, and at last it was my turn and I 
was carried, very much surprised but very com- 
fortable, down to a hospital on the edge of the 
sea. 

The things which happen to the soldier who 
reaches one of those admirable hopitals which 
stand about Salonika depend altogether on the 
extent and nature of his trouble. Some, of course, 
get better in two or three weeks. They have that 
space of rest, of the luxury of sleeping in proper 
beds and of unusual food, and then they go quite 
cheerily back to their units. Others improve a 
little but not so much as might be desired, and 
one day a very senior medical officer comes round 
and declares that they must be sent to Malta. 
Others again are obviously so ill or so badly 
wounded that they will never be able to serve in 
Macedonia again, but they, too, are sent to Malta, 
for it is not the custom now to send people straight 
home to England from Salonika. Everyone goes 
first to that island which has been turned into a 
tremendous hospital, where under the old shadow 
of the Knights of St. John the work of healing is 
carried out on a scale more spacious than anything 
of which they in their time could dream. 

So there is every now and then in those hospitals 

m 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 



a jolly day of packing and preparation. There are 
men who have had to lie without moving for weeks, 
and there are smiles on their faces while the order- 
lies run to and fro and baggage reappears from 
the stores in which it has been locked away. 
Others are stumbling about on crutches, and others 
again walk proudly if a little unsteadily up and 
down, saying good-bye to their companions of a 
little while, and collecting messages from nurses 
to be given to nurses in Malta. The motor ambu- 
lances are at the door and presently they roll away 
down the long road which leads to the quay where 
the green and white tender is waiting. Out in 
the bay the ship is ready to receive its happy pas- 
sengers and all day long the stream of feeble but 
smiling people is passing over the gangways. 

There is one view of all these towns of exile 
which is fit to take its place among the loveliest 
views in the world — the view over the stern as 
the departing ship bears one away. That view 
of Alexandria convinced me of the splendor of 
the sweltering town, that view of Salonika left 
with me a vision of enduring loveliness. Later on 
that view of Valletta was to leave with me a mem- 
ory of sunlit beautiful age, enduring still to serve 
the generations. 

Salonika from the sea has a power and glory of 
its own. One is away from the detestable streets 
and the utterly alien people. It is no longer pos- 

180 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 

sible to be afflicted by the abominable smells or 
deafened by the crash and clatter of iron tires 
across the primitive paving of the road. It lies, 
pierced by the tall fingers of the minarets, with 
trees breaking the monotony of the tall buildings, 
with the hills rising very nobly behind it and with 
the excellent beauty of Kotos standing as a banner 
to the east. All the unpleasant things are forgot- 
ten, and as the picture fades into the majesty of 
the mountains one can even think of it kindly. 
And to be able to think kindly of Salonika is a 
great miracle. Presently there is the glory of 
Olympus in the west and there comes a little rise 
and lift beneath the feet as the ship begins to feel 
the power of the open sea. 

Those were the days before the Britannic and 
the Braemar Castle were sunk, before the Hun had 
declared to an outraged world his determination 
to sink hospital ships. In those days one of the 
green and white boats was a kind of Ark, a place 
of refuge where one escaped for a time from all 
the circumstances of war. When we went on board 
our revolvers and ammunition were taken from 
us. What became of the ammunition I do not 
know. It may have been sent ashore, or it may 
have been dropped over the side. The revolvers 
were locked away and we did not see them again 
until we reached the journey's end. The Hun tales 
of the abuse of hospital ships are on the same level 

181 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

as the rest of the lies of that mendacious race. 
There has never been anything of the kind ; we have 
played the game all through. 

We went out upon the sea and the night came 
down and received us, and we thought of other 
nights when the transports went stealthily through 
the darkness. Through all the hours men would 
be standing with loaded rifles ready to act on the 
first sign of danger. There would be the closed 
and blinded portholes and the stifling air of the 
cabins that killed the power of sleep and drove 
us in desperation on to the dark and silent decks. 
There we would stand, peering out into the dark 
of perilous night, searching for the ghostly form 
of the little destroyer that tried the way before us. 

All that was past. We went now splendid with 
innumerable lights, green and white still through 
the darkness. Through the wide open ports there 
came the delicate air of the night to cleanse and 
refresh our unhappy bodies and bring them com- 
fort. Those gleaming lights proclaimed to all who 
might pass the fact that we were apart from the 
main occupation of the peoples of the earth, that 
from the heart of the conflict we had come to the 
place of peace. In those wide, air-swept wards we 
slept as those may sleep whose travail is accom- 
plished, whose strife is at an end. 

It was on our second evening that the con- 
trast between our lot and the lot of all others who 

182 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 

went out on the waters upon their lawful occa- 
sions was most violently brought home to us. Far 
away as darkness fell a light became visible. When 
we went on deck after dinner it was flaming high, 
and we crowded to the rail staring at it with won- 
dering eyes. Presently we gathered that it was 
a sort of a signal light — I have forgotten its official 
name — a thing which would float on the water 
and burn for many hours. It was certain that in 
the neighborhood there would be people in boats, 
awaiting deliverance. 

There was, as it turned out, only one boat. The 
story was quite on the usual lines. A tramp steamer 
was working up to Salonika when the submarine 
found it and fired the torpedo without warning. 
The skipper had remained by his ship to the last 
in the boat which was found, while the rest of the 
crew had been picked up an hour after the torpedo 
did its work. 

We swung up through the night, slowed and 
stopped, and there, far below us was the little 
boat, dancing on the easy waves while our lights 
fell across the pale, upturned faces. A ladder 
slipped down our side, and the little figures were 
clambering up. Last of all came the skipper, 
hugging all sorts of possessions under his arms, 
and the little boat slipped past us and away into 
the darkness as our engines awoke once more, for 
a hospital ship may perform no act of salvage, not 

183 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

even so much as the hoisting of a little boat out 
of the sea. It was left, to be a waif and a stray 
upon the waters — that thing which men had made 
so carefully, with such pride and skill of craftsman- 
ship. Far below the waves were steering to and 
fro above the steamer. 

And above something more than the steamer. 
The captain was a stolid, red-faced man who spoke 
very little and very rarely ; but once to a few of us 
he broke his silence. "I wouldn't have cared 
only they got my chief engineer," he said. "We'd 
been together the best part of twenty years. He 
was asleep in his bunk when they came along. 
Killed him like a dog. No warning, no chance to 
send him a word. The bloody swine — the bloody 
swine." It may be that in years to come we shall 
be exhorted not to hate the Germans any more, 
but you will never tear that hatred out of the 
hearts of the men who go down to the sea in 
ships and have seen the foul treachery of the Hun 
upon the deep waters. 

But we at least journeyed in safety and came 
in due season to Malta, which has become a sort 
of Bournemouth to Macedonia. Green and white 
ships are passing in and out of the complicated 
harbor of Valletta all the time, bringing the in- 
valids to be cured. In that harbor we saw one or 
two interesting things which must not be described, 
and several others which have been described to 

184 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 

death already, and when at last we were safely 
on land again we found that Lord Methuen, who 
is Governor of the island in these days, had come 
to meet us. Also he had come to inform us that 
a new War Office order had come out stating that 
moustaches need not be worn any more. We were 
properly grateful. It is not often that you have a 
Field Marshal to give you directions about shaving. 

Malta is a pleasing island, but I did not set out 
to write a book about it, and it only comes in now 
as a suburb of Salonika, so I need say nothing of 
the interesting and curious things we saw there, 
neither of the goats, nor of the curious hats of 
the native ladies, nor of those portable farms which 
you can pick up and carry away in a cart. The 
progress of the soldier who arrives at Valletta 
from Macedonia is that he goes first of all to a 
hospital and remains there till he is considered 
to be well on the way to recovery. Then he is 
passed to a convalescent camp where he spends a 
few jolly weeks of comparative idleness till one 
fine day he is packed off to an embarkation camp 
where he is reminded that he is a soldier and that 
he knows all about forming fours and route 
marches and the rest. Finally he is put on to a 
transport — not a green and white this time — and 
goes back to make some more discoveries about 
the Seres road. 

But a minority do not go back. Somehow or 

185 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

other they cannot contrive to get better. The 
clear skies, the pleasant breezes and the fine air 
will not accomplish the cure. The weeks pass and 
they are still feeble. Their wounds still trouble 
them, or fever still comes to shake and torment 
them, and at last the decision is taken. They must 
go home. It is not for them to remain any longer 
under the indescribable blue of the Mediterranean 
sky. It would not be good for them to see Sa- 
lonika again; their time of service in that unhappy 
land is over. They are free to dream once more 
of gray skies above a gray and turbulent sea, of 
green hills and the depth of the secret woods and 
of all the dim loveliness of our own land. 

So there came a day when a very happy party 
of us went once more to Valletta and found a 
hospital ship waiting for us, a ship which went in 
time threading the maze of the harbor, bearing 
us away across the open sea to a little secret bay 
where a green and white monster was waiting to 
receive us. The Aquitania is not rushing million- 
aires from one side of the Atlantic to the other 
in these days of war. She has something else to 
do, and her great halls are full of small white 
beds. Nine shiploads of the sick passed across the 
gangways from the lesser vessels which serve in 
the Mediterranean, and then the mighty engines 
were at work. A little space of days and nights 
and we were riding the Atlantic swell that swings 

186 



THE WAY OUT OF THE LAND 



through the gate of Gibraltar. Again a little 
while and England rose out of the sea to greet 
and comfort her returning sons. 



■ifi? 



PART II 
CHAPTER I 
The Prelude 

NOWHERE in the world is it possible to find 
a tract of land so important and so little un- 
derstood as the Balkan Peninsula. Its im- 
portance can be judged by the fact that through the 
ages it has been continually ravaged by war; but it 
is hard to find anything to prove how little it has 
been understood. Before the war intelligent and edu- 
cated people were in the habit of looking very wise 
and nodding gravely whenever the Balkan states were 
mentioned, but I doubt if one in fifty of them could 
have given a clear account of the recent history of 
Adrianople or Scutari or of Salonika itself. And yet 
it is not too much to say that in the story of those 
three towns there is to be found the immediate preface 
to the war which occupies the world today. 

What I have to do in this chapter is to give as brief 
and as clear an account as possible of the condition of 
affairs in the Peninsula immediately before the war. 
To deal with the matter in detail would 

188 



THE PRELUDE 



require quite a number of large, dull books. For 
my own part I should hate to have to write a 
full history of the Balkans, and I suspect that 
most people would hate to have to read it. Many 
admirable works on the subject have appeared in 
many countries, and to them all in serch of fuller 
information must be referred. All that I can do 
is to give the broad outlines, but if they are prop- 
erly grasped a big step forward will have been 
taken. 

The first fact to be noted is contained in a short 
sentence. It is this : It is not possible to draw an 
accurate ethnographic map of the Balkan Penin- 
sula. The races have become so mixed that it is 
not possible to say of one part of the country that 
here you will find Turks, here Greeks, here Serbs, 
and here Bulgars. It is not even possible to say 
that there is a line between the districts occupied 
by the Christians and those held by Moslems. Sa- 
lonika itself, in the days when I knew it, was 
eloquent of the confusion which lay in all the 
country behind. As you came up from the sea 
the outstanding feature was formed of the innu- 
merable minarets of the mosques; later you dis- 
covered that the town contained Christian churches 
of great age, and later still you discovered that it 
was largely inhabited by Spanish Jews. In all 
that country to the north of the town, of which 
I have written in the first part of this book, there 



i8p 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

is so fine a confusion of tongues that a man would 
need a share of the gift of Pentecost to enable him 
to speak to each of its inhabitants in his own 
tongue. There are villages where a knowledge of 
Arabic will carry you through. In other places 
you must have Greek, and in others you will be 
helpless without the Slav dialects. For all offi- 
cial purposes French is, of course, adequate, and 
it is possible to find French-speaking people in the 
most remote districts. But such discoveries are 
merely a matter of luck. 

There is, then, this confusion. Broadly speaking 
it may be said to have arisen from the fact that 
the Balkans lie across the route which leads from 
Asia to Europe. The whole area is like nothing 
so much as that part of the seashore which lies 
between the high and low water marks. Here the 
tides of invaders have swept up, and here, reced- 
ing, they have left jetsam to mark their brief abid- 
ing. There have been, too, cross-currents sweep- 
ing up from the East, so that the Slav has left the 
stamp of his presence. And far back in the dark- 
ness of the past there came tribes who made for 
themselves homes among the great mountains of 
this land. Looking back now we can perceive, 
as it were, dim, tremendous shapes moving to and 
fro, but there is little that can be stated with any 
certainty except that in the dawn of our own age 
thtre were these peoples inhabiting the land, hav- 

! 9 



THE PRELUDE 



ing great traditions and ambitions of their own, 
and certain more or less fixed antagonisms. 

The chief of those antagonisms was, of course, 
that which parted the Christian from the Turk. 
In this area the Turkish invasion found its chief 
harvest and eventually spent itself. There was the 
long period when the Moslem held the land, and 
the races which we know today were condemned 
to a fugitive existence in the remote valleys. It 
might, perhaps, have been thought that such a 
community of peril and persecution would have 
bound all the Christian peoples together, but they 
had divisions even among themselves. There were 
the Roumanians, for example, a Latin race sur- 
viving from the last days of the Roman empire. 
They had nothing in common with the Slavs who 
lay to the west of them, or with the Greeks. There 
were the divisions between the Roman and the 
Greek churches; and, as though these were not 
enough, here were presently to be divisions among 
the Greeks. There came the time when the Powers 
of Europe began to consider these divisions and 
to consider how they could be turned to their own 
advantage. 

And here I have to write of things which are 
hard for an Englishman to understand, and must, 
I imagine, be even harder for an American to 
grasp. There came into play all that jealousy and 
suspicion of each other which seem to be inevit- 



ipi 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

able when nations are only separated from one 
another by lines drawn on a map. Austria and Rus- 
sia sat watching each other, and on the flank there 
was Italy, and far to the north the Prussian state 
was considering the road to the East. All these 
were regarding the Balkans and one another; all 
had determined that they must have a voice in 
the happenings on the Peninsula. There came to 
Germany the dream of Mitteleuropa, the State 
which was to stretch from the Baltic to the Per- 
sian Gulf. Austria, filled with fears of Russia and 
of her own Eastern subjects, became a willing ally. 
Russia herself, reaching out to a port on warm 
water beyond the Dardanelles, took the Slav races 
of the Peninsula under her special protection; and 
Italy, remembering how in the past she had been 
despoiled by Austria, became very watchful. The 
stage was set for the tremendous drama in which 
we all are playing a part today. 

Farsighted and thorough, Germany began to 
prepare for the end which she desired. There was 
a coming and going of German agents through 
the Balkans and there was an amount of diplomatic 
work whose purpose was hardly realized at the 
time. There is no need to trace the course of it 
here; it is enough to point out that at the begin- 
ning of the war the thrones of Bulgaria, Greece 
and Roumania were all occupied by men who had every 
reason to favor the German cause. But beyond 

192 



THE PRELUDE 



all this was the progress made in Turkey. The 
Kaiser took the Moslem races of the world under 
his special protection and his servants worked un- 
ceasingly to prove to the Turks that in all Europe 
they had only one friend. German officers took 
charge of the Turkish army and shaped it accord- 
ing to their own ideas. Krupps' factory made guns 
for that army, and advice and aid in military 
matters was to be had for the asking. There came 
at last the projected Berlin-Bagdad railway and 
the heart of the German idea was written in letters 
which all the world might have read if all the world 
had been able in those remote days of peace to 
look at such matters as we can look at them today. 
If, then you take Balkan affairs as they stood 
ten years ago, they were roughly as follows: In 
the first place, Turkey still ruled the major portion 
of the Peninsula. If you can find a map of that 
time you will see that Turkey in Europe was quite 
considerable, and to all outward appearance im- 
portant. But behind all this appearance of power 
there was the developing strength of those which 
we may call the native Balkan states. Both Serbia 
and Bulgaria had memories of the past and ambi- 
tions for the future, and in their remote and limited 
areas they were preparing for a struggle which 
should restore to them the glories of the past and 
establish them in splendor. Greece, too, had 
visions of power, and Roumania shared the general 

193 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

desire for the expulsion of the Turk. But in addi- 
tion to these ideas which were flourishing in the 
Peninsula there were the ideas of the European 
Powers. Russia was determined, mainly for her 
own sake, to protect the Slav races, and Germany- 
was equally determined to secure for herself a path 
through the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. Believ- 
ing in the permanence of the Turk, she sought 
chiefly to establish herself in power in Turkey, 
but she did not neglect the other nations. Every- 
where her agents were at work. By countless 
devious methods which no one else understood or 
in the least appreciated before the war, she was 
making friends for herself in all the countries. Her 
soldiers were at work making maps so that when 
we came to Salonika and sought for maps of the 
land there were only the German maps to be had. 
Later on, our own Survey provided us with excel- 
lent maps, but in the earlier days we had only those 
others, loaded with detail, and frequently inac- 
curate. 

Into all this atmosphere of planning and plotting 
there came a thing which, rightly handled, might 
have prevented this war. From the dreams and 
desires of the Balkan races there arose an attempt 
to give form and substance to those dreams. There 
came into being the Balkan League ; the Turk was, 
for all practical purposes, bundled out of Europe, 
and for a little while it must have seemed to the 

i 94 



THE PRELUDE 



rulers of Prussia that all their work was foolish- 
ness and their labor vain. 

There is no space for a history of the Balkan 
War of 1912, or even of the intensely interesting 
series of events which led up to it. Years of patient 
labor went to the forming of the League. There 
were all sorts of old jealousies and suspicions to 
be overcome. The Balkan nations had a fine crop 
of grievances against one another, and the ques- 
tion of Macedonia itself was enough to set them 
at enmity one with another — as most unhappily it 
did at a later date. In Macedonia more than any- 
where else the confusion of races is so acute that 
each of the nations can put forward some sort of 
an ethnographic claim to at least a part of the 
district. Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece were all 
thinking longingly of Salonika, and they did not 
trust each other. And yet the League was formed, 
owing chiefly to the skill of that great statesman, 
M. Venezelos. The nations made their prepara- 
tions with incessant toil and sacrifice. The move- 
ment was utterly and intensely popular, and all 
classes were on fire for its success. There came 
Turkey's war with Italy in Tripoli and it seemed 
that the time was ripe. The last preparations were 
swiftly and most secretly made. 

At the last moment the Powers of Europe be- 
came aware that something really serious was 
taking place, and they joined in one of the most 



195 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

preposterous performances of which diplomacy has 
ever been guilty. An ultimatum was presented to 
Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria forbid- 
ding them to fight and assuring them that if they 
did they would not be allowed to profit by any 
victory they might win. The King of Montenegro 
declared war on Turkey on the day that that price- 
less document reached him, and his allies were close 
behind him. In a month Turkey in Europe had 
ceased to exist. Four tiny nations with a total 
population of some ten millions had defeated a 
Power with twenty-five million inhabitants. There 
remained to Turkey only Scutari, Adrianople and 
Constantinople. 

There followed the business of dividing the 
spoils. There was all that tract of conquered ter- 
ritory to be disposed of, and there were the four 
allies to share it. Also, there was Roumania, who 
came forward with a claim for compensation for 
her forbearance in remaining neutral. And be- 
yond all these there were the Powers of Europe, 
full of suspicion of one another and determined to 
secure that no advantage should be gained by any 
possible enemies. Austria, Italy, Russia and espe- 
cially Germany were determined that the parti- 
tion of the possessions of the Turk should be 
settled on lines agreeable to themselves, and diplo- 
macy was at work once more. 

To describe the happenings of the months which 

196 



THE PRELUDE 



followed the war would be a long and unpleasant 
business. Delegates from the nations met in Lon- 
don and argued endlessly. The agents of the 
Powers were at work also with all manner of sub- 
terranean influences. Germany, in particular, was 
urging Bulgaria along a course which could have 
only one end. 

It is necessary to glance at the position of Bul- 
garia. She went into the war with a great desire 
for Salonika. She needed such a port, and there 
was also the fact that that part of Macedonia which 
lies between the town and her borders does con- 
tain a number of Bulgars. It happened, however, 
that in the course of the war, the part allotted to 
her took her away from that goal of her desire 
and forced her to do most of her fighting in the 
direction of Constantinople. The actual occupa- 
tion of Salonika was effected by the Greeks. Short- 
ly after they had entered the town, a Bulgar 
army appeared and desired to take part in its 
occupation. Even then, in the midst of the cam- 
paign, the allies nearly came to blows, and it was 
made very clear that Greece meant to keep the 
town. 

Serbia, too, put in a claim to the place. The 
Powers decided that she must not be permitted a 
port on the Adriatic — here again the hand of Prus- 
sian diplomacy was at work — and she desired an 
outlet to the sea. The Greeks had their dream of 



i 9 7 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

a realm which should stretch to Constantinople, and 
they had no idea of giving up the town which they 
had occupied. 

Left to themselves, or aided by wise and honest 
counsel, it is possible that the Balkan States might 
have worked out a solution of the problem, but that 
was the last thing desired by the Prussian states- 
men. A Balkan League of nations, living at amity 
one with another meant the end of the dream of 
Mitteleuropa. It put a barrier aross the way to 
the Persian Gulf, and spelt the failure of all that 
long endeavor which began when, in 1889, the 
Kaiser paid his first State visit to any European 
sovereign by journeying to Constantinople. With 
characteristic malice and zeal, the Prussian diplo- 
mats set to work to fan the passions of the late 
allies and to create a tempest which would render 
the continuance of the League impossible. 

I said at the begining of this chapter that in the 
story of Salonika, Adrianople, and Scutari is to be 
found the immediate preface of the present war. 
The truth of that statement so far as Salonika is 
concerned will perhaps be clear already. In the 
case of Scutari the position was rather different. 
That fortress held out for a long time, but the 
Montenegrins wanted it and determined to have 
it. The powers ordered Montenegro to stop the 
siege, but the men of the Black Mountain were not 
taking orders from the Powers, and at last they 

ip8 



THE PRELUDE 



succeeded. But they had not done with the Powers. 
In the end they were forced to give it up, and it 
became the capital of Albania, a state created on 
a foundation of the mutual suspicions of the rulers 
of Europe. Adrianople, too, held out long after the 
rest of the Turkish dominions had passed into 
other hands, but it fell at the last and for a time 
it seemed that only Constantinople would remain 
to the Turk in Europe. 

But Germany had done her work well, and Bul- 
garia went to war with Serbia and with Greece. 
Roumania took a hand, and the Turk saw his op- 
portunity and came back and retook Adrianople. 
Utterly defeated, Bulgaria had to give in, and when 
finally the partition was made, she, who had suf- 
fered more heavily than any nation in the original 
war, got the smallest share of the spoils. The 
Balkan League had come to an end. Instead of 
the unity which had achieved so much there were 
only new hatreds, new grievances and Germany 
and Austria were free to dream once more of the 
possession of Salonika and the dominion which 
should stretch from the Baltic to the Mediter- 
ranean. 

It is impossible to blame too heavily the diplo- 
macy which made it possible for such a condition 
of things to come about, but it is only too clear 
that the result achieved is exactly what was in- 
tended by at least one of the parties to the trans- 

199 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS , 

action. Whether or not the other Powers could have) 
brought about happier results is a point which the 1 
future may decide; the one thing certain is that 
Prussian methods had achieved a victory, and had, 
left the Balkans ripe for a renewal of strife. 

They had robbed those beautiful countries of| 
the prospect of peace and they had made ready the 
way for the conflict which is shaking the world 
at this time, and it cannot be doubted that the 
clever people of the Wilhelmstrasse were very 
pleased with themselves. There is some small con- 
solation in the fact that history will know how to 
condemn them. 



200 



CHAPTER II 

THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 

WE are so far already from the beginning of 
the war that it is necessary to run over very 
briefly the events which went before the August days 
which saw the violation of Belgian neutrality. 

The heir to the Austrian throne was the Arch- 
duke Franz Ferdinand. In many of the circles of 
his own land he was unpopular, and regarded with 
suspicion. Moreover, he was morganatically mar- 
ried, and in no case could his children succeed him. 
On June 28, 1914, he and his wife paid a visit to 
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. It must be re- 
membered that Bosnia had been annexed by the 
Austrians, and that its people are mainly of the 
Slav race and suspected of sympathy with Serbia. 

On the occasion of this visit the police of 
Sarajevo were given orders to take no precau- 
tions for the safety of the visitors, and were told 
that the military would provide all the protection 
that was necessary. While the visitors were driv- 
ing from the station, a bomb was thrown at their 



201 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

On their way from the Town Hall to the hospital 
another person fired at the Archduke and his wife 
with a revolver, and mortally wounded both of 
them. 

All the circumstance of the assassinations is 
mysterious. It is true that the man who fired the 
shots was a Serb, though not a subject of Serbia. It is 
true that the crime is said to have been planned 
in Belgrade, but it has never been proved that there 
was any knowledge of it in official Serbian circles. 
It is undoubtely true that the event was regarded 
with satisfaction in many parts of Austria, and 
we all know how extremely useful the Austrian 
government found it. On July 23 an ultimatum 
was presented to Serbia which required her not 
only to lick the dust from the boots of Austria 
but also to give thanks prettily for the meal. A 
more thoroughly abominable document could not 
be imagined, and Serbia was given forty-eight 
hours in which to make her submission. 

And Serbia submitted. On eight of the ten chief 
points she gave way altogether, and she did not 
explicitly refuse submission on the other two. But 
her submission was useless. She was not intended 
to submit for the Germanic Powers had made all 
their preparations and were quite ready for the 
war of which they had dreamed for so long. On 
July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia, and the 
nations of Europe were whirled into conflict. 

202 



THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 



Russia was drawn in as the natural protector of 
Slav peoples. On August 1 Germany declared war 
on Russia, and on France on August 3. There fol- 
lowed the violation of Belgium and the entry of 
England. 

It is difficult in writing of Balkan affairs at this 
time to keep strictly to the matter in hand, be- 
cause those affairs are inextricably linked with 
the affairs of the world and there are such count- 
less reactions between them. This war has be- 
come quite clearly and definitely a struggle for 
freedom in which all the servants of freedom in 
the world are now united. From the very begin- 
ning the German dream was one of subjugation 
and of a dominion of force, and through the long 
years of the conflict the fact has been made plain. 
But it is necessary to remember that it did begin 
as an attack on Serbia, and to bear the fact in 
mind because of the influence which it must have 
on the shaping of events after the victory has been 
won. 

Serbia was attacked because she, the rallying 
point and the hope of the Balkans, stood between 
Austria and Salonika, and also between Germany 
and Constantinople. With Serbia strong and estab- 
lished, it was hopeless for Austria to dream of the 
port on the Aegean of which she had dreamed for 
so long, and there existed, too, across Germany's 
road to the East, an abiding menace. In the Prus- 

203 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

sian view the essential step towards the fulfill- 
ing of their ambition was the abolition of Serbia, 
with the simultaneous crushing of Russia and 
France which must go with the abolition. 

While the armies were swinging into action in 
Flanders, France and Russia, Austria set to work 
to deal with Serbia, and attacked the little country 
with a great army. For four months there was 
fierce and bitter fighting, and at last, on December 
2, 1914, the invaders reached the capital, Belgrade. 
Three days later they were driven out again and 
thrust northward once more, and for the next six 
months the enemy were too busy elsewhere to re- 
turn to the attack. 

It was an amazing performance — a triumph of 
intense^ mobile troops over a conventionally armed 
and equipped modern army. The Serbian soldier 
with his long loaf of bread, his hundred cartridges 
and his rifle could go anywhere at a moment's 
notice in the shortest possible time. Moving swiftly 
among the mountains of his land, he harrassed and 
tormented and destroyed the Austrians, very much 
as the British troops were harrassed by the Boers 
in the last South African war. But there was one 
thing lacking in the Serbian army, and a more 
deadly foe than the Austrian was busy through all 
the country. There came an epidemic of typhus, 
and the Serbs had no medical service capable of 
dealing with it. 

204. 



THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 

American readers will not need to be reminded 
of the part their country played in the early days 
of the war, nor will it ever be forgotten in Europe. 
Medical missions were hurried to Serbia from 
America and from England. Doctors and nurses 
and stores were sent, and a most gallant, and in 
the end an effective, fight was made against the 
disease. Some of us know something of the 
horrors which those volunteers had to face, and 
though there is no need to dwell on them here, 
I have myself heard stories at first hand which 
leave nothing at all to the imagination. But the 
sorrows of Serbia were only beginning ; there were 
far more bitter things in store for her. 

While all this had been happening, and indeed 
in the first three months of the war, Turkey had 
chosen the part which she intended to play, the 
part which had always been assigned to her by 
the Prussian. On the outbreak of war she declared 
her neutrality, as did Greece, Bulgaria and Rou- 
mania. England, France and Russia gave assur- 
ances that, if she remained neutral, she would not 
be disturbed either during or after the war, and 
there were many Turks who sincerely desired to 
remain at peace, but other influences were too 
strong. Germany had been at work for a quarter 
of a century, and the time had come when she 
needed the harvest of the long sowing. It was 
pointed out that this was the time when Egypt 

205 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BA LKANS 

and Cyprus might be recovered from England. 
Every imaginable cause of offense against England 
was magnified and insisted upon. Enver Bey, the 
most powerful man in Turkey, had recently been 
appointed Minister of War, and he was altogether 
German in sympathy. A German general, Liman 
Pasha was put in command of the Turkish army, 
and on October 28 a Turkish fleet bombarded 
Odessa, and the running blaze of war had reached 
far into Asia and the north of Africa. The cam- 
paigns in Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia became 
inevitable: the way was cleared for the tragedy 
of Gallipoli, and a new point and seriousness was 
given to those small street campaigns in India 
which have occupied so much of the attention of 
England all through the war. 

But though Turkey had joined with the Central 
Empires, their way was not yet clear with the 
Balkans. Italy still stood apart, and Germany was 
anxious not to draw her into the conflict. At the 
beginning of February, 1915, Italy informed Austria 
that any further action in the Balkans would be 
regarded as an unfriendly act, so there was one 
reason the more for leaving Serbia alone. But 
Italy had dreams and desires of her own. On the 
eastern coast of the Adriatic Austria holds terri- 
tory which was once the possession of Venice, and 
Italy saw a chance to recover her lost provinces. 
On May 25 she declared war on Austria, and one 

206 



THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 



chief reason for inaction in the Balkans was gone. 

At the time, however, the Central Powers had 
another Balkan affair on their hands. In February, 
English and French ships bombarded the forts on 
the Dardanelles. At the end of April the first 
landing was made on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and 
on August 6 there was the second landing. The 
world knows the story of the tragic failure; all 
that I have to do here is to point out that while 
there remained the most remote prospect of the 
success of the undertaking it was the gravest 
menace to the German plan, and our enemies were 
compelled to deal with it before attempting any 
other enterprise. But before the end of August 
it was plain that Gallipoli was a failure, and the 
consequences of that failure followed swiftly. It is 
time to glance at the position of Greece and 
Bulgaria. 

In Greece at the beginning of the war, M. Ven- 
ezelos was in power. You will remember that he 
was practically the creator of the Balkan League. 
His was the dream of a federation of the Balkan 
States which should secure peace to the peninsula. 
It is, indeed, still the only means whereby the 
claims of nationality can be safeguarded and the 
whole problem solved. The establishment of Ger- 
man rule or the restoration of the Turkish Empire 
would mean the end of that dream for one or 
perhaps for many generations ; it might even mean 

207 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

the death of those valiant little nations, since 
Germany has proved conclusively that she will not 
tolerate nationality other than her own and that 
she is prepared to crush the spirit of nationalism 
with every instrument which science can devise 
and brutality apply. Realizing these things, 
Venezelos sought to bind the Balkan States to- 
gether once again and to reconstitute the League 
which had been shattered by the war of partition 
in 1913. 

Bulgaria, of course, was the difficulty. Fooled 
by the Central Powers, she had turned against her 
former allies and had lost most of the benefits 
which she had sacrificed so much to obtain. The 
question was whether Bulgaria could be brought 
back, whether by gifts she could be persuaded 
to return to the old allegiance. Venezelos did his 
utmost to convince both Greece and Serbia of the 
necessity of making concessions to Bulgaria. The 
King of Greece refused to listen to his sugges- 
tions, and he resigned. Not until it was too late 
could Serbia be persuaded to make any concessions, 
and meanwhile the failure at Gallipoli had set the 
enemy free to work in another direction, and had 
also convinced the Bulgarian leaders that the Ger- 
man was the winning side. On October 7 a great 
army under von Mackensen crossed the Serbian 
frontier, captured Belgrade on October 9, and pro- 
ceeded to sweep the country. In early November 

208 



THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 

the Bulgarian army captured Nish, and by the end 
of the month Serbia had ceased to exist. 

The Allies had declared their intention of sup- 
porting Serbia, but their help, when it came, was 
too late and utterly insufficient. The first Anglo- 
French troops landed at Salonika on October 5, 
and the 10th Division was hurried up-country. It 
got there in time to share the agonies of the retreat 
when the Serbian army, broken and defeated, was 
scattered in the mountains. All that the Allies 
coud do was to occupy the territory of which I 
have told in the first part of this book. 

I do not pretend to be giving a comprehensive 
review of the almost intolerable complex of Balkan 
affairs during the war, and I am not going to 
add to the confusion by dealing at length with 
Greek affairs during the months of which I have 
just been writing. To follow all the threads of 
the story of the Near East requires a pretty stiff 
mental effort, coupled with a comprehensive knowl- 
edge of history and geography ; and all that can be 
done here is to endeavor to give the broad outlines 
in a form in which they can be followed without 
too much exertion. Leaving out, then, the ques- 
tions which had risen between King Constantine 
and M. Venezelos, it is enough to say that the 
statesman was driven into exile, and that the King 
entered into a secret agreement with Germany 
and Bulgaria, in consequence of which Fort Rupel 

209 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

was handed over to the Bulgars on May 25, 1916. 
A little later a Greek division at Kavalla surren- 
dered and was taken to Germany. At last the fol- 
lowers of M. Venezelos were tormented into action 
and in September a Committee on National De- 
fence was set up at Salonika. 

Meanwhile Roumania had come into the war. It 
had been by no means clear in the beginning which 
side she would take, but since the Roumanians are 
kin to the people of Italy it was guessed that they 
might be found in the same alliance, especially as 
the Roumanians desired to regain Transylvania 
from Austria. Whether or not the time of the 
Roumanian intervention was happily chosen is a 
question which cannot be discussed at present. It 
is enough to record the fact that she declared war 
on August 27, 1916, and her armies marched into 
Transylvania, with considerable success at first. 
But Mackensen invaded the Dobrudja from the 
south and von Falkenheyn came in from the west. 
At the end of November the armies joined and on 
December 6 they took Bucharest, and another 
Balkan state had been wiped off the map. At the 
end of 1916 the whole of the Balkan Peninsula 
was in German hands with the exception of Greece 
and the portion of Greek Macedonia which is oc- 
cupied by the Allied forces. The friends of Ger- 
many in Greece grew bolder and there was a time 
when it seemed quite probable that that country, 

2lO 



THE BALKANS AND THE WAR 



too, would come in on the side of the Prussian. 
But a swift and happy series of events led to the 
abdication of the pro-German King and Queen and 
the return to power of M. Venezelos, and there are 
Greek battalions fighting beside our own in Mace- 
donia today. 



211 



CHAPTER III 

THE IMPORTANCE OF SALONIKA 

IF you were to put the phrase which I have 
placed at the head of this chapter before any 
ordinary member of the Salonika force and ask 
him to tell you all about it, he would be badly 
puzzled. In my time — and I cannot doubt that 
it is the same today — it did not occur to us that 
we were important or that our remote and undis- 
tinguished occupations had anything to do with 
the war of which we read in the papers sent out 
from home. When I came back and people asked 
me what we were doing in Salonika it was hard 
to find any satisfactory answer to the question. 
I could tell, as I have told here, of the making of 
roads and of the enduring of various discomforts, 
but all our life seemed so remote from war as it is 
understood in France. Really it did not seem that 
we were doing very much, or that we were likely 
to do anything. We were giving occupation to a 
certain number of the enemy, and that was the 
best we could say for ourselves, and it did not 
appear that we should ever be able to say any- 

212 



THE IMPORTANCE OF SALONIKA 

thing better. We understood from the people at 
home that we were expected to advance, but our 
knowledge of the country made us scornful of those 
suggestions. It was the old story; an army can- 
not live without its transport and it was not pos- 
sible to believe that our transport could stand the 
strain of any advance that would be of practical 
value. 

Indeed, you could not expect anyone serving in 
Salonika to have any great ideas of the possibilities 
of the campaign, unless he happened to be a very 
exalted person on the staff. Undoubtedly opera- 
tions as seen by the man who plans them are 
strikingly unlike those same operations from the 
point of view of the man who carries them out, 
and the commanders may have thought it possible 
for us to do all sorts of enterprising things. But 
if they did, they did not order us to do them, and 
we continued to make roads. One advance was 
certainly made, and in the summer of 1916 the 
Serbians were able to recover a tiny bit of their 
own country at Monastir. I remember that about 
the same time an inspiring story was circulated; 
it was said that General Sarrail had been inspect- 
ing the enemy's arrangements on the whole front 
from an aeroplane, and immediately we had a 
whole crop of cheering rumors. But they came to 
nothing, and at this time of writing, nearly two 
years later, the position remains very much what 

213 



C A M P A I G NING IN THE BALKANS 

it was then, with the exception that the newspapers 
have ceased to predict an advance from Salonika. 

Of course such an advance could be made. I 
can see that now, if I could not at the time. The 
valley of the Vardar practically runs into the 
valley of the Morava which leads on to Belgrade. 
Along this route ran the Roman road from Bel- 
grade to Salonika and the present railway follows 
the same course. If the Bulgars — who happen to 
be some of the best trench-diggers on earth — could 
be pounded out of their positions, if we could get 
up artillery and supplies enough, the thing could 
be done. I know that since I left the country the 
work of road-making has gone forward at a great 
rate and that the transport problem is certainly far 
less serious than it was in my time. Even so, of 
course, we should meet it again directly we had 
passed beyond the zone of our occupation, and it 
is certain that the railway would not be left in 
condition to be of any service, but no one can 
doubt that, given adequate force and arrangements 
for supply, the adventure could be as successful as 
was the Austrian sweep through Serbia in 1915. 

It is certain that the enemy must realize this 
fact at least as clearly as we do, and that realiza- 
tion must compel him to detach a considerable 
force to guard the front which we are holding. 
I am writing at a time when tremendous things 
are happening on the Western front and no one 

214 



THE IMPORTANCE OF SALONIKA 

can tell what the position will be at the end of a 
month or even of a week, and it is not possible 
to say what will have happened before these words 
are in print. But if you will look back to this 
first week of April, 1918, I think you will agree 
that there could be no more unpleasant news for 
the enemy at this time than that of a powerful 
movement northwards from Salonika. I do not 
imagine that anything of the kind is likely to 
happen, but I am quite sure that it would happen 
if a sufficiently powerful enemy force had not been 
left to make any such experiment unprofitable. It 
is no small part of the art of war to keep your 
foes waiting in idleness to prevent you from doing 
something which you do not really mean to attempt, 
and I am beginning to suspect that from this point 
of view alone the Salonika expedition has been 
justified — though I should have found it hard to 
believe anything of the kind when I was serving 
in the profoundly irritating country or for many 
months after I returned. 

But there is an aspect of the importance of 
Salonika which is political rather than purely 
military. In parenthesis, it is well to note that 
our original landing was made on the invitation 
of M. Venezelos. Whether or not the idea of the 
landing originated with the great statesman it is 
not possible to say at present, but it is at least 
probable, and it is quite certain that later fruits 

215 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

of it have been such as he would desire. For a 
long time it did not appear that any real good 
was to result from the adventure, and indeed it 
caused such an amount of irritation in Greece as 
to make it seem a mistake. It was, too, horribly- 
costly, especially in ships. In its original purpose, 
as an aid to Serbia, it was a ghastly failure, and 
as a part of the world campaign against Germany 
it resembled, in 1916, nothing so much as a spirited 
attempt to shoot an elephant with a pop-gun. But 
at this time it is possible to see another and greater 
justification for it than that which I have men- 
tioned. It is possible to realize that in years to 
come it may appear as one of the really happy in- 
spirations of the war. 

In the first place, our occupation provided a 
foothold for the remnants of the Serbian army and 
a starting-point for the hopes of the Serbian people. 
If we had not been there it is hard to think what 
would have become of those fine soldiers. Scat- 
tered in all directions, hunted through the moun- 
tains of Albania, they were in a terrible position. 
Even Greece was not open to them, seeing that 
the King of Greece had dismissed M. Venezelos 
for declaring that Greece would stand by her treaty 
obligations to Serbia. Without organization, almost 
without arms, they could only have remained as 
fugitives, scattered and useless to the end of the 
war. But the fact that their allies held Salonika 

216 



THE IMPORTANCE OF SALONIKA 

gave them another chance, and they were quick 
to take it. They came to the city by land and 
sea. They were equipped and their army was 
reconstituted till it became once more an effective 
force. And in Salonika itself there was no more 
heartening sight than that of those Serbian sol- 
diers with their new uniforms and their happy 
faces. It was worth while just to have given them 
another chance, and to have retained for their na- 
tion a foothold on the peninsula. 

And in the second place our occupation defeated 
the aims of the pro-German party in Greece. Noth- 
ing but our presence in Macedonia could have accom- 
plished that. The Greek Nationalists made Salonika 
their headquarters and there they received M. 
Venezelos on his return from exile. It is possible 
to put the matter in another way and say that if 
we had not been there the entire peninsula would 
have been under German control by this time. 
Every harbor would have been a refuge for her 
ships and submarines, and the whole of the cam- 
paign in Palestine would have been in peril. Aus- 
tria would have gained that which she desired orig- 
inally to obtain, and hope for the Balkan races 
would have been at an end. 

As it is we hold a position which is a perpetual 
menace to all the Eastern operations of the enemy. 
It has been said that Constantinople, Belgrade and 
Salonika are the three keys to the Balkans and 

2lf 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

therefore to the great route to the Persian Gulf. 
While we hold one there can be little comfort in 
the possession of the other two. Judged by the 
map, our occupation of Macedonia may seem a 
small affair, but it is so utterly important as the 
position of a pawn on the chess-board which, so 
long as it remains, forbids the progress of the 
more majestic pieces and has power to destroy even 
the greatest of them. It has a moral effect which 
is far greater than the material inconvenience 
which is caused to our foes, and it is possible to 
imagine what an amount of irritation there must 
be to the German High Command in the presence 
of the bit of occupied and fortified territory on 
their flank. For such a base is very much like a 
gun. In itself it is small and of little importance, 
but when it goes off it has a disturbingly long 
range. And there is something else. Our con- 
tinued presence in Salonika is something in the 
nature of a banner to all the Balkan peoples. It is 
an enduring token of the failure of the Central 
Powers to reach at least one of the main points at 
which they are aiming. We may be very sure 
that it is noted in Sofia, and it is necessary to 
remember that Bulgaria was never wholeheartedly 
in favor of the war. To Serbia and Roumania it 
must appear as one little ray of light in the midst 
of their present darkness, and there must be many 
of the scattered peoples who realize that, since we 

218 



THE IMPORTANCE OF SALONIKA 

remain, the Hun is not yet victorious, neither is 
all hope at an end for the little nations. 

I am thoroughly aware of the arguments against 
the expedition, and I have stated quite a number 
of them myself at various times. I know, too, that 
there are remarks scattered through this book 
which may seem to contradict the substance of 
this chapter, but I have let them stand. They rep- 
resent the views of the man on the spot, and when 
they were written they appeared to be true. But 
at this time it is quite certain that in spite of all 
these things which can be urged against it, the 
Salonika adventure is more than justified. 



2ip 



CHAPTER iy 

PEACE IN THE BALKANS 

THERE are a good many people who, irritated 
by the complexity and endless complications 
of Balkan affairs, are accustomed to declare that 
those unhappy nations must settle their quarrels 
among themselves, fighting, if need be, to the point 
of mutual extermination. There are still more 
who cherish a comfortable ignorance of the whole 
business and ask what they have to do with the 
squabbles of a lot of half-educated savages three 
thousand miles away. And if those are the condi- 
tions in England, I imagine that Americans will be 
still more inclined to regard the solution of the 
Balkan problem as a matter with which they can 
have no concern. Yet if there is one thing which 
this war has demonstrated more clearly than ar- 
other it is that the peace of the world cannot be 
secure while there is either strife or the occasion 
of strife in the Peninsula. 

I have attempted to show that the real cause 
of this was the Prussian desire to dominate the 

220 



PEACE IN THE BALKANS 

East. Through the Balkans ran" the old trade 
routes from Europe to Asia. To a certain extent 
those routes were neglected during the period of 
the development of navigation, but the laying of 
the first mile of railway foretold their reopening. 
As land transport of every kind becomes swifter 
and cheaper, so will the importance of the old 
routes increase, and the way that runs through 
Belgrade, Nish, Sofia, and Adrianople must increase 
and not decrease in importance. It is certain that 
at the end of the war, the Central Powers will be 
so exhausted that they will be in no condition to 
enter upon fresh adventures for a generation or 
more, but it is equally certain that their eyes will 
be turning ever in the same direction. It is no 
small part of the business of the rest of us to make 
certain that meanwhile there shall be erected across 
the path a stable barrier. 

And there is something more than this. It was 
declared by the Allies as long ago as December 
21, 1916, that "no peace is possible which does not 
secure recognition of the principle of nationalities 
and of the free existence of small states." It is 
of the essence of our aims to secure freedom for 
all nations, just as it is of the aim of the Prussian 
to Prussianize all that he can conquer. Before 
ever the war began, in Poland and again in Alsace, 
the Prussian demonstrated his hatred and fear of 
nationalism, and in Belgium and Serbia during the 

221 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

war he has insisted again on his determination to 
tolerate no nationality but his own. If he had his 
way in the Balkans, he would bring them all under 
his autocratic rule; if the Allies are at all lax at 
the conclusion of peace he will contrive that affairs 
of the peninsula are left in such a condition that 
they will be exposed to the recurrence of internal 
strife in which, as in 1912 and 1913, his diplomacy 
will have a chance to shape affairs according to 
his desires. I want to insist as strongly as possible 
that we shall have failed in our aims if the con- 
clusion of peace does not bring justice and con- 
tent to the nation of the Balkans. We shall have 
come short of the thing which we set out to per- 
form, and irilso far as we fail in this area, the tri- 
umph will remain with the enemies of freedom. 

So much having been affirmed, it must be stated 
that the re-drawing of the map of the Balkans is 
one of the most perplexing tasks which anyone 
could have to undertake, and it is likely to require 
all the tact and goodwill of all concerned. The 
difficulty of it must never be forgotten, or else 
we shall have some enthusiastic fool coming for- 
ward with a ready-made plan and persuading 
people into its acceptance. If anything is to be 
made of the business, all the obstacles will need 
to be frankly and fairly faced. Let us consider 
some of them. 

There is first of all the question of Turkey. 

222 



PEACE IN THE BALKANS 



When the Turk first came to Europe, and in those 
distant days which saw him besieging Vienna while 
his ships ruled the Mediterranean, he was a men- 
ace. Since that time and through all the centuries 
of his decline, he has been merely a nuisance, but 
a very great nuisance indeed. It is not possible 
to doubt that the conclusion of peace must see the 
end of his rule in Europe. He has no sort of 
claim for any consideration, and he must go. 

The case of the Bulgar is very difficult. He 
was in the land before the Turk, and he was of 
those who preserved their nationality through the 
centuries of Turkish rule, nor can the part which 
he played in 1912 be forgotten. Duped by the 
Central Powers in 1913, and dragged half-heartedly 
into the present war, he is more to be pitied than 
any of his allies. The Bulgar nation has as secure 
a right to a place in the peninsula as any other 
and any peace which seeks its suppression will be 
falling short of the expressed aims of those who 
are at present its enemies. With the King of Bul- 
garia there may be an account to settle, but with 
his subjects we can have no quarrel. That is to 
say, the western nations must and will desire that 
Bulgaria shall be treated fairly. 

Whether the desire will be immediately echoed 
by our allies who are his neighbors is another 
matter. War leaves ugly scars behind it, and it 
is certain that both Serbia and Roumania will be 

223 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

cherishing unpleasant memories. They will be 
blaming Bulgaria for much that their lands have 
suffered and no doubt they will be blaming her 
justly. Also they will want recompense for all 
that they have endured, and the fact that their 
desires coincide with so many of Bulgaria's will 
help to complicate matters. At this time of writ- 
ing, for instance, Bulgaria is in possession of the 
Dobrudja and it is not in the least likely that she 
will be happy to restore that district to Roumania. 
There must, too, be disagreement over the Aegean 
coast which will bring her into opposition with 
Serbia; and Macedonia remains the problem which 
it has always been. 

The position of Serbia is, indeed, one of peculiar 
difficulty. She desires an outlet to the coast, and 
her desires in that direction are counter to those of 
many other people, and complicated by the facts 
of the stubborn Balkan geography. It generally 
happens that races regard geographical boundaries, 
but the Balkan people seem to have looked upon 
natural obstacles as things to be surmounted, and 
that habit has helped to increase the difficulty of 
denning boundaries. There is, however, one natural 
outlet for Serbia by way of the Drin valley to the 
Adriatic. Her only other obvious road to the sea 
is by way of the Vardar to Salonika. When it is 
remembered that Italy has a claim to the Adriatic 
coast and that Greece holds Salonika, the coming 

224. 



PEACE IN THE BALKANS 

need for forbearance and a spirit of mutual accomo- 
dation will be obvious. 

These are just specimens of the difficulties which 
must be dealt with, and there are many more of 
the same nature. They are not insuperable, but 
they will call for the most careful application of 
the principles of justice, and for something more. 

There is, again, the question of those districts 
which are at present under rule of Austria. Serbia 
has an ethnographic claim to Bosnia and Herzego- 
vina, and Roumania a similar claim to Transylvania. 
The recognition of the principle of nationality cer- 
tainly points to the restoration of these areas, and 
in the same way Roumania should receive Bessar- 
abia which was before the war in the possession 
of Russia. That, of course, raises an entirely fresh 
series of problems. All the time that she remained 
a normal Power, Russia was intensely interested 
in the Balkans. It is impossible to say whether 
or not she will have regained anything that can 
be recognized as a government by the end of the 
war, and it is as obviously impossible to conclude 
any treaties or enter into any agreements with 
any of the hectic individuals who are shouting their 
claims to speak for her at present. I am uncom- 
monly glad that the requirements of this book do 
not make it necessary to produce any suggestions 
as to the future of Russia, but the fact that Russia 
may presently become a nation again must be re- 

225 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

membered and arranged for in any settling of 
Balkan affairs. It does not seem unreasonable in 
any event to suggest that Bessarabia should be 
attached to Roumania, and it might make matters 
easier in other directions. 

The old Russia, of course, would have been 
thinking hard about Constantinople. That city is 
also the home of a dream of the Greeks who have 
desired for a long time to see it restored to them 
as the old capital of their empire and the ancient 
dwelling place of the ruler of the Greek church. 
But the way for Constantinople, the Bosphorus and 
the Dardanelles seems to be that they should be 
internationalized and that the forts should be dis- 
mantled, in fairness to Russia as to all the other 
nations which may need to use them. And I am 
not sure that Salonika should not be internation- 
alized as well. 

I put this forward merely as a suggestion, and I 
am perfectly aware that to many people — and espe- 
cially to the Greeks — it will be an unpleasant sug- 
gestion. But it is an idea which has several advan- 
tages. The area which is at present occupied by 
the Allied armies, bounded roughly by the Vardar, 
the Bela Sitza mountains and the Strama is as 
hopeless a tangle ethnologically as you will find 
in all Macedonia. All the races of the Peninsula 
are to be found in its villages, scattered about its 
plain or clustering in its hills. If that area were 

226 



PEACE IN THE BALKANS 

put under international control there would at 
least be no violation of any clearly-defined national 
rights. 

It is from Salonika that the work of reconstruc- 
tion in the Balkans will be most easily begun. If 
our occupation had done nothing else at all, the 
roads which we have made would remain to be our 
memorial. Through the months and the years our 
men have been at work they have made a system 
of roads through all the area, and from that center 
the roads can be extended in all directions. We 
have given the framework of civilization to a con- 
siderable space of country and from Salonika, as 
from the handle of a fan, the framework could 
stretch out in all directions. 

It is true, of course, that the Macedonian of 
today dislikes our roads. The bullocks which crawl 
along with his queer little creaking wagons go with 
unshod feet and the wagons themselves have 
wheels with wooden tires. For centuries his roads 
consisted merely of tracks of beaten earth, soft 
underfoot. Our roads have their foundation of 
rock and their layer of broken stone, and they are 
too hard for the feet of his cattle or for his wheels. 
The consequence is that instead of using our roads 
the natives commonly make for themselves a track 
beside them, and they will go any reasonable dis- 
tance out of their way to avoid using the roads. 
But it is merely a matter of custom and custom 

**7 



CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 

gives way in time to advantage. If the Mace- 
donian found that it was profitable to carry his 
goods about at a slightly swifter rate than his 
present mile and a half an hour it is not to be 
doubted that he would adopt iron tires and more 
expeditious cattle, and thus would discover the 
advantage of our roads. And once a habit of that 
kind is formed it spreads very rapidly. 

All the country has such great possibilities. I 
can only speak from experience of that part of it 
which the Allied forces are holding, but I know 
that there are great fertile tracts all through the 
peninsula and all of its nations might be happy and 
prosperous and of service to the world. All that 
is required is a secure peace, and equitable govern- 
ment, and organization of the means of transport. 
And we have, as I have said, the beginning of this 
last in that area which is so intimately known to 
so many of our men at this time. With Salonika 
held as an international port it would be free for 
Serbia and Bulgaria and Greece to use its harbor 
and there would be no more jealousy over its pos- 
session. The borders of these nations would touch 
the borders of the town and by rail and by road 
their merchandise could come down to it from far 
inland, and, rebuilt after the cleansing of the fire 
which destroyed so much of it in 1917, it may 
stand greater and more prosperous than ever, 
serving three nations instead of one. 

MB 



PEACE IN THE BALKANS 

So there is a suggestion; doubtless there will be 
many others. But when the time comes for the 
new boundaries to be defined it will be necessary 
for the great Powers to avoid too much interfer- 
ence, and especially to see that there is no attempt 
to exploit the differences of opinion which are 
quite certain to arise. It will be for them to stand 
aside as far as possible, watching all the time to 
see that there is no unfairness, but giving to the 
peoples concerned as free a hand as possible. With 
care and patience and wise guidance where it is 
needed the Balkan states will come to an agree- 
ment at the last. 

When it is reached, that agreement must be 
guaranteed by the nations of the world. It will 
not be enough to leave their interests in the future 
as they have been left in the past in the hands of 
such immediately interested parties as Austria and 
Russia. The preservation of their integrity must 
be the business of all of us, of America as well as 
of England, France and Italy. This is the greatest 
opportunity there has ever been for solving the 
problem, and when the solution is found we cannot 
afford to run the risk that any malice or greed 
or envy of the future shall be able to destroy it. 

THE END 



How five thousand men founded a Brit- 
ish community in the heart of Germany. 

INTERNED IN GERMANY 

By H. C. MAHONEY 

390 pages. Illustrated. $2.00 net. 



IF you would know what life at a German 
prison camp is like, live through it in this 
book. The author, a British civilian, was 
a guest at four, ending up with a long sojourn 
at the notorious Ruhleben. Here is the story 
of the life that he and his fellow-prisoners 
lived; how they organized their own com- 
munity life, and established stores, banks, 
churches, theatres — in fact all the appurten- 
ances of civilized life. There are also numer- 
ous stories of escapes, of adventures in the 
camp and even of the treachery of some of 
their pro-German fellow-prisoners. 

The book shows a side of the war which 
has not previously been dealt with in full 
detail, and it is, besides, an unusual record of 
hardship and suffering and of the many ways 
in which the indomitable spirit of these men 
rose above the trials of prison life. 

Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York 




300 Page* of Exciting ^itev 3wCM| in the Great Game 

Adventure ^ ™ I of Empire! 



MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN 
SECRET AGENT 

By CAPTAIN HORST VON DER GOLTZ 

With 16 pages of illustrations. 
$1.50 net. Postage 15 cents. 

FOR ten years Captain von der Goltz was a 
secret agent of Imperial Germany. In this 
remarkable book he tells the story of his 
career, from the time he was plunged into the 
whirlpool of secret diplomacy until the day in 1916 
when he was released from a British prison and 
sent to testify in the trials of various German con- 
spirators against the United States. _ There are 
twelve chapters, each one filled with incidents as 
dramatic as any in romance, some of them thrilling, 
some amusing, many of them momentous, but all of 
them full of the fascination of real adventure. 

What This Book Tells 

Ten years of German intrigue in the United States. 

How the German Government betrayed the German 

Americans. 

The real reason why Germany made trouble in Mexico. 

The German Spy System in the United States and how 

to cope with it. 

Other startling revelations of the secret history of 

today. 

Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York 



"NOTHING OF IMPORTANCE" 

By BERNARD ADAMS 

334 Pages. With maps. $1.50 net 



""Ty TOTHING of Importance" say the 
I ^W communiques when there is no big 
action to report. Lieut. Adams has 
taken this phrase as a title for the series of 
swift, vivid impressions which compose his 
book; his chapters, with their glimpses of 
scenes in billets, in the trenches, of snipers, 
working parties and patrols, bring the reader 
more clearly in touch with the reality of war- 
fare than do many more spectacular books. 

"Few, very few books have come out of 
the war more real in their message or more 
poignant in their appeal." — The Cleveland Plain 
Dealer. 

"Of the scores of books which are pushing 
their way into print nowadays as part of the 
war propaganda, none more truthfully and 
satisfactorily fulfills its mission than 'Nothing 
of Importance'." — The Springfield Union. 



Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York 



The Red Battle Flyer 

By 

CAPTAIN MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN 

12 mo. Illustrated. $1.25 net. Postage extra. 
At all Bookstores 

By Captain Manfred von Richthofen 

THE most famous of German aviators was 
Freiherr von Richthofen who was killed in 
action in April of this year, after being 
credited with eighty aerial victories. 

This book is the story of this German's ex- 
ploits and adventures told in his own words. It 
is the story of countless thrilling battles in the 
air, of raids, and of acts of daring by the flying 
men of both sides. 

"Richthofen's Flying Circus" has become fa- 
mous in the annals of aerial warfare. This book 
tells how the "Circus" was formed and of the ad- 
ventures in which its members participated. 

"The Red Battle Flyer" is offered to the Ameri- 
can public, not as a glorification of German achieve- 
ments in the war, but as a record of air fighting 
which, because of its authorship and of the in- 
sight it gives into the enemy airman's mind, will 
prove of interest and value to our own flyers as 
well as to readers generally. 

Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York 



WILHELM HOHENZOLLERN & CO. 

By EDWARD LYELL FOX 

2 37 pages- Illustrated. $1.50 net. 

A striking account of Germany as it is today, by a 
former war-correspondent, now Captain of Field 
Artillery in the National Army. 

"It appears to me that you have been strikingly 
fair and just in your estimation of Germany's case 
and have put your finger upon the real issue, 
namely, her system of government with its false 
ideals .... your book is interesting at this time 
and should be illuminating to all serious minded 
people." Major General Joseph E. Kuhn, Military 
Attache to Germany, 1915-16, formerly President of 
the Army War College. 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDS OF 
THE GREAT WAR 

By FRANK J. ADKINS 

292 pages. $1.25 net. 

A study of the origins and causes of the Euro- 
pean war. 

"The book as a whole is a singularly just presen- 
tation of the sweep of the main currents of Euro- 
pean history for practically one thousand years, 
and it is written in a style that draws one on in his 
reading from page to page." — Philadelphia Record. 

THE STORY OF YPRES 

By HUGH B. C. POLLARD 

118 pages. Illustrated. 75c. net. 

The heroic story of Ypres, storm-center of the 
Western Front. 

Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York 



020 916 191 6 



